Thread

I’ve subscribed to the Atom RSS feed of these forums using firefox.

The Newsfeed never loads, it says Bookmark failed to load.

So i put the atom feed URL into the browser bar and hit return to see what was going on. I was surprised to be prompted for a username and password. I put my username and pass in and lo and behold my bookmark in FF loaded.

So my question is this:

Why does it need authentication?

I presume firefox cant load the session when it has timed out as there is no option to put in a username and password when adding a feed to FF.

Any ideas anyone?

The EE forums includes private forums (for example, the Pro Net), so we require that the feeds by authenticated. I didn’t realize that FF didn’t support that. I believe you’re the first person to bring this up since we started doing this years ago (might be wrong on that count).

I’m confused, how were you trying to load it that it didn’t prompt you for authentication?  Any access attempt I make to the overall forum feed results in me being prompted for authentication. As Les mentions, this is so the EE knows which forums to pull information from for your feed, and only occurs when you have some access protected forums with HTTP Auth active.

I have it in the bookmarks toolbar. All my other RSS feeds that live there (including the CI forums one) reload now and then or i can ctrl click on the feed title and choose reload and it reloads for me.

With the EE one, it says at the top of the feed list something like “Bookmark Failed to Load” i can click on it and choose reload until the cows come home and it just sticks with that message. However if i then actually visit the feed URL in firefox, i get a window prompt me for the username and pass which i enter, which then must start a session which the bookmark is able to use as it does immediately reload.

This is the latest version of FF on the mac if that’s any help.

I never tried it but I could imagine FF silently quits the background auto-update in case something goes wrong instead of nagging zhe user… Just a guess though.

If you don’t mind to change the address to
http://forumusername:[email protected]/forums/atom/
in your bookmarks, it should play nicely in any case.

OK, i’ll give it a go, thanks!

Well that seems to have worked well. I’m not sure ho happy i am storing my password in FF in that field in plain text but i’ll see how it goes. Perhaps i’ll try a different RSS reader instead.

Thanks again.

Or why not use an on-line service like Bloglines?

I do use netnewswire and have been meaning to consolidate my rss into one reader (haven’t got round to it yet)

It seems that the solution of using Firefox to read this forums RSS by putting my username and password into the URL has stopped working. No idea why either. It just says “Live Bookmark Loading…..” and then lists some old feed entries.

Looks like it might be a longstanding FireFox bug that hasn’t received any real attention.

Ah how annoying. Thanks for looking into the issue though Derek. Very kind of you 😊