Podcasts Blocked Everywhere, Can't Access Mobile Site

Late last week, I noticed that the Beastcast feed hasn't pushed to my usual app. NBD, it was something I could resolve later. I opened my desktop player and updated the subscriptions there to... zero result. Okay. Went back over to my phone and popped out a bit to discover that all of my GB subscriptions had encountered errors during the last refresh.

Spurred to investigation, I thought to try the website's player and ran straight into a Captcha wall like I've never seen. Every time I verified, the damn thing just sent me back to itself. On my desktop, I hit the same Captcha, but luckily was let through. So I gave up and listened to the podcast by way of a Chrome tab, which seemed to work fine.

When I got more time to fiddle, my first step was to switch apps. For reference, I had been using Podcast Addict on Android and MusicBee on Windows 10. On my phone, I grabbed BeyondPod and plugged a couple of feeds in to no avail. On my PC, iTunes ran into the same errors. Some quick searching on this forum seemed to suggest that Podcast Addict (?) may have been blacklisted by the site, but I'm not entirely sure what options are getting the go-ahead (and there's no way iTunes isn't clear skies).

Either way, while trying to figure this out I started up this week's Bombcast (again, through the desktop browser) and paused the player somewhere around 90 minutes in. This morning, I tried to resume and got about 2 seconds of audio before it cut and the player stuck in place. Refreshing just leaves me stuck at 0:00:00. Trying to download the podcast gets me another Captcha followed by an error message (Reference #25.85d756cf.1458773237.14c731dc).

So I'm getting pestered with an arduous robot joke about every time I pop over to the site, cannot get through at all on mobile, and can't listen to any of the podcasts by any means available to me. Help is very much appreciated!

I'm also having similar issues. Using just normal iTunes for the Giant Bombcast and Giant Beastcast and the feeds have not updated successfully since the evening of 3/17. Other podcasts are fine and I've not updated iTunes recently.

I have not seen the Captcha issue today, but was seeing it almost every time for the past few days on both my Windows laptop and iPad mini. I was able to verify and get to the site though.

@jazz_lafayette: Sorry about that. You can thank some idiots at University of Texas at Austin who used Grande Communications as well as the university network to launch an attack on us and got those networks put on a watch list. I deleted the block and you should be ok now.

@readyplayerone: It looks like the source of your problem is the same. See above...

@edgework: Oh, yuck. Thank you for taking care of the problem, anyway!

@edgework: Thanks, podcast feeds updated normally!

So for about a week now (starting with last week's Bombcast), i'm unable to access any of the GB network podcasts through iTunes. Getting the same error on the Bombcast, Beastcast, an Gaming Minute. I've tried deleting the podcasts and all files and resubscribing and i'm getting the same issue.

Now that I think about it, I don't know that I've successfully accessed a video on this site through Chrome in that same period either. I've had to watch stuff via my Roku or via youtube.

How do i resolve it?

@cthomer5000: What error message are you getting? Can you access the feed urls of the podcasts you are trying to download directly? http://www.giantbomb.com/feeds/

@cthomer5000: I don't see anything wrong with your account or your IP address. There's no bans etc.

What happens when you try to watch a video?

I'm having similar issues on my phone as well. Currently using Doggcatcher. Clicking the RSS link on the page (browsing with Chrome) loads it fine, but Doggcatcher reports a 403 error -- with and without my username/password credentials. I encountered a video error last week on my PS4 (First time seeing that) so maybe something got changed in my account? Desktop seems to load everything fine, as does Chrome on my phone.

Thanks for any help! =) Looking forward to the podcast today, but so far no luck. Maybe I'll listen from my browser.

@zmcgrew: I had the same problem using Doggcatcher, but I was able to use a workaround. Apparently, the Doggcatcher devs recently changed the way it handles https, which broke the feed updates for some sites. (Changelog from the Play Store page: "1.2.5254 Use new http library by default, can be disabled in advanced settings; 1.2.5253 Fix: some feeds that use https fail with an ssl handshake exception(in order to enable this, please go into DC's advanced settings and enable experimental http library)")

The solution right now is to re-enable the old http library. You can do this by going into Doggcatcher's Settings -> Advanced -> Legacy HTTP library [Enable]

Try to update feeds again after enabling it, and it should work this time.

EDIT: Disregard the above advice. The dev of Doggcatcher pushed an update on Wednesday (on the Play Store) that fixed the issue with the new HTTP Library. So, no need to enable the legacy library for GB feeds.