No premium bombcast update on PocketCasts/iOS

Anyone else using Pocket Casts on iOS waiting for yesterday's premium bombcast to drop? Manual refresh to no avail!

How did you add your premium feed to Pocket Casts? I switched from BeyondPod last week but I can't figure how to input my Premium account on the feed :(

I have not gotten that or GB presents Pixels yet

Same here, on the Android version of Pocket Casts.

Well, at least it's not me... ugh.

@joeyravn You manually add a podcast by URL. Here's what I used for the Bombcast proper: https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@www.giantbomb.com/podcast-xml/premiumbombcast/

BTW, folks: re-subscribing (unsub, then re-sub using the link above) worked. The bombcast logo has also updated.

UPDATE: Just did the same for Giant Bomb Presents (to force PocketCasts to see the update there, too) and... oh god, it's the same icon as the Bombcast itself -- not the purple icon. You can't tell them apart. Argh.

@planetary: Oh, no. The Beastcast already has the generic GB logo attached, for some reason. Not sure if I want two podcasts with messed up art.

Edit: Sure enough, just deleted and re-subscribed and the premium Bombcast feed now has the new podcast but just the generic GB logo as artwork. Did the same for GBPresents, and still no Pixels podcast, but the art is right.

Moved this to the Bug Reporting forum, but I'm actually a bit unclear on if this is an issue on the GB side or the app side. (attn @edgework)

Could be that the PocketCasts server(s) is doing more than just reading our RSS feed and that got them blocked. We allow pure RSS readers but do not allow RSS readers that are also scrapers, i.e. they load the actual content indexed by our RSS feed. This is something that is against our Terms of Use and cannot be allowed. We're stepping up enforcement after a string of morons using scrapers to re-host our content on their servers. For Podcast requests we allow more than other kinds of requests so this one must be doing some crazy things.

If someone at PocketCasts wants to get in touch with me I can talk with them about how they can play nice and be allowed in. They can contact me at edgework (at) giantbomb.com. We (The Giant Bomb community) got BeyondPod to wake up and respond, maybe we can do it with these guys too. Write your App Developer! I'm more than happy to talk with any of them.

This is all pretty annoying, considering that A) I only switched to PocketCasts due to the BeyondPod block (via unanimous and unquestioned recommendations in the previous thread) B) It appears to load all OTHER Giant Bomb feeds correctly (including premium feeds) & C) It is a premium app whose refund period is LONG past.

Just got used to it and now have to switch for the second time in as many weeks, trying to remain calm, but... yeah.

How about we confirm what's going on before asking paying subscribers to take action they really shouldn't have to take?

@bwheeeler said:

Weird. The Pixels episode showed up for me when I re-added the GB Presents feed just now.

@planetary: I know a few of these services got blocked for being too aggressive and not updating is a prime symptom. From what I've read so far they seem to have more than one server that reads our feed and not all have been blocked so it may work sometimes.

This isn't a targeted block, this is an automatic block based on their behavior. I wouldn't know for sure if or how they're blocked unless I knew their IP address(es).

Deleted Presents, and first time I tried to re-sub it added the Beastcast. Now it won't add any GB pods

i just tried to delete and readd. The picture when i added the feed was the interview dumptruck but it in the app it shows the right picture.

But still no pixels.

How about Giant Bomb just allows reputable developers to access content in the way they need to--the same way that seems to work for the rest of the Internet. Why is this whole thing so difficult?

Same issue here.

Pocketcasts also has a Web version of the app which streams the podcasts as well, would this count as "scraping content"? There is no way I'm switching to another podcast app, so my other option would be downloading the podcasts to Google Drive using a podcatcher on my PC or something, but I shouldn't have to do that. I subscribe to loads of podcasts and the GB premium stuff is my favourite.

Hundreds, nay thousands of other podcasts work fine in PocketCasts, so why this action from GB? The normal podcasts seem to work in that app, does this still point to a block?

This has really bummed me out. Don't make your system so secure that it's paying users can't use it!

Just adding weight to those voicing their displeasure. This is hitting GB's most loyal fans hardest. Hopefully you guys are well aware of this by now, but it's really on Giant Bomb to reach out to Pocket Casts and work out a solution.

I agree with nayson. For the app creator, it should not be their responsibility to make changes just because 1 podcast feed not working. It should be the podcast creator who should make changes or reach out to the developers to request for changes so that their listeners can utilise the apps they want to.

I know its technically not on either side to make contact with each other. GB has the TOS to defend themselves and enforce it so no app that goes against the TOS is able to be used for the GB feed. The podcast app works on most other podcasts so the developers may feel that its not on them to make changes. The ones who suffer will be the users. I know after the beyondpod incident, many users switched over to pocket casts(looking at the threads and myself personally switching). I would hate it if i am not able to get the full experience of my GB podcast just because of the choice of app that i use. This is the 2nd case in recent times that certain podcast apps has issues and hopefully this will be the last. I hope that GB will be able to help the users solve the problem rather than get the users to contact the developer to contact GB. We as fans just love the content and want to have convinent ways of accessing them.

There are a lot of scrapers out there that are genuinely detrimental to the site's performance while also providing no real benefit to anyone. It's unfortunate that legitimate services people use end up getting affected in the process of eliminating those, but hopefully it can get sorted out and not impact too much on them.

I agree that Giant Bomb should make an effort to contact the folks at Pocket Casts. It's your users that are suffering from this issue.

Having said that, I did send a support email to Pocket Casts via the app, explained the issue, and gave them edgework's contact info as he suggested. Hopefully something will come of that.

Also affected by Pocket Casts not updating. Reached out to them but I'd like to think they could get whitelisted on GB's side for whatever it is that they're not doing quite right. Granted it might be a pain in the ass for GB to do this, but it is affecting your fans and paying subscribers.

This seems really dumb, two podcast apps having problems in one week. Please fix this, I've been using Pocket Casts flawlessly for a while and now the premium feeds aren't updating.

I wish you guys wouldn't take the "scorched earth" approach with this stuff, considering I've not only paid for premium but also for the app and neither work! Especially since you just told people to switch from a different podcast app they may have potentially paid for.

It seems based on what I'm hearing, they're scraping our content and displaying it in their app. That will never be allowed; it's theft and copyright infringement and its the primary reason we're blocking all scrapers right now. The errors their servers are getting provide an email address that will contact me directly so they can resolve the issue. I've yet to hear from them. We cannot proactively go out to every app developer mostly because we have no idea who they are. If pocket casts stops scraping content and just loads the RSS feed they will be allowed back in.

I'm sorry to do this but I also have to voice my displeasure here. After hearing the news about BeyondPod and taking the time to switch to Pocket Cast after glowing recommendation, this is getting really annoying.

Glowing recommendation from who? Because those are the guys you need to be annoyed with.

It was pretty much the unanimous recommendation given to displaced BeyondPod users in this thread. There were a lot of us, and at the time, I happily dropped the money to buy Pocket Casts, hearing from everyone that it worked perfectly with GB, only to learn just a couple of days later that no, now it's totally blocked too.

@cloudymusic: Pretty much this yeah.

Also being told that the podcast app I've been using for a while isn't going to work anymore and told to switch to something else, doing and so and THEN being told it's also not going to work is really really really shitty. I know a big part of it is my own fault but it still sucks.

Its possible they are running from a commercial web host that is blocked. Like I said the error returned provides a bunch of information including a email address that routes to me. They could contact me and we could definitely work this out.

What exactly is "scraping content"? This is the only podcast that seems to have a problem with any of this.

@jachin: Basically just grabbing content from Giant Bomb and then re-hosting it on their own servers.

I don't know how the Pocket Casts iOS/Android app works, but their web app definitely doesn't appear to be doing that. When you play the standard Bombcast feed through there, the URL of the mp3 file being played is the Giant Bomb URL from the RSS.

@sweep: You still need to authenticate with a valid account before you can subscribe to the premium feeds via Pocket Casts.

Regardless of the issue (which doesn't seem to actually be happening?) I've sent a tweet and emailed their support, seeing as GB themselves can't be arsed to.

I dug deeper into this. They are playing mp3s just fine. Or at least we are allowing them to. That is all I see from them using the user agent "Pocket Casts" Maybe other aspects of their app depend on data from their servers that they get from us using a different user agent and that data stream had been blocked. Still this is their problem. We are allowing them to play our podcasts.

OK so I went and bought an app I'm never going to use. It works perfectly fine for me. All the latest podcasts are there. This is something you definitely need to talk to Shifty Jelly about. Its maybe a bug in older versions of the app? A bug in newer versions and corrupted data on your device? I have no idea but its not us.

Yeah, I got the latest Premium Bombcast via PocketCasts just fine, with no need to re-add feeds. This doesn't seem to be affecting all PocketCasts users.

I'm getting the premium bombcast/beastcast feeds just fine, it's the premium video feeds that aren't updating for me. At any rate, I'll try uninstalling and reinstalling the app later tonight. The android version did just get an update, so maybe something went wrong there.

I have been (and as far as I can tell am currently) getting the Bombcast, GB Premium and Beastcast feeds, but GB Presents isn't updating for me.

Looks like a big update for Pocket Casts came out on the 27th - which happens to be the day before the latest Bombcast and GB Presents - so if it really isn't a problem on GB's end I'm willing to bet that's what broke them.

I want to chime in and let you know that we are seeing the same reports from some users at our Mysterious Universe podcast. We found that our server had automatically blocked Pocket Casts IPs, so we went ahead and whitelisted them, but some users are still having issues with their premium feeds not updating.

Also, as some Bombcast users have reported, some feeds are working for some and not working for others. Very frustrating for us podcasters as most users immediately assume it's an issue on our side. I'm convinced this is purely a Pocket Casts issue.

Because of groups like sticher who take advantage of other peoples content. I presume the auto-blocks are in place just in case some rouge developer attempts to use data in such a way that breaks the ToS.

Anyways not that is matters but premium feeds are working well on Simple Podcatcher (android) and the apple Podcasts app(ios).

@edgework said:

Thank you, but... well, yeah, of course. :) For at least some of us some of the time, (re-)subscribing causes the latest podcasts to show up. What's unclear is if it will remain fresh or go stale, which is the symptom under discussion here.

Sent a support tweet to @Moogmeister and directed her to this thread. Other accounts to notify include @shiftyjelly and @pocketcasts, apparently. They seem to prefer getting support notifications via this new-fangled social media stuff.

@planetary: Has anyone gotten in touch with the developer? Send him my email, I'd be happy to talk to him if he thinks its our problems edgework (at) giantbomb.com

I'm having trouble with the regular premium feed. The new film and 40s hasn't been added. Re subscribing didn't work. Don't have twitter, and I don't want to make one to contact the pocketcast devs.

Also, pocketcast is widely considered the best podcast app on Android. Not sure what @sweep is on about. It's great!

Presents feed working again on PocketCasts, no need to re-subscribe or brute force anything.

@edgework: I sent them an email yesterday and pointed them to this thread. Haven't gotten any response.

But my feeds seem to be working again now. Well. The "Giant bomb presents" feed worked. None of the gbeast feeds seem to work right now.

Still not working for me on 2 different android devices and through Pocketcasts Web player. Readded the feeds on all and I am missing the latest bombcast on everything still...