Podcast Episode Description in RSS Feed Gets Cut Off

Howdy there devs who work on Giant Bomb. A bug that I have noticed is that the episode description of podcasts in the RSS feed gets truncated, causing the description of the episode to be cut off when reading it in a podcast reader or RSS feed.

The RSS feed has the following attributes of the truncated description: "description", "itunes:subtitle", and "itunes:summary". I created a gist that specifically shows off what I am talking about in the XML. As far as I know, there is not a word or character count for podcast descriptions, but I could be wrong.

Here is an example from 12/15/2015's episode. The full description is:

As the holidays draw nigh, GameSpot's Mary Kish joins in for a chilly chat about Nintendo patents, produce rankings, Star Wars saturation, the long-awaited release of Nuclear Throne, smelly VR, Pokemon pooping, more foreign movie titles, and the perils of anonymous Tumblr asks.

The description in the XML is:

As the holidays draw nigh, GameSpot's Mary Kish joins in for a chilly chat about Nintendo patents, produce rankings, Star Wars saturation, the long-awaited release of Nuclear Throne, smelly VR, Pokemon pooping, more foreign movie titles, and the perils of

The last three words are missing. My armchair guess is that it gets truncated wherever the RSS feed gets generated based on word count.

For example, here is how the episode from 12/15/2015 looks in Pocket Casts.

Thank you, and I appreciate all the work that goes into making the site work!

@brettchalupa: Hey there.

It is indeed truncating the description, at the nearest word. Itunes has a limit of 255 characters per field (http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html).

@jslack Thanks for a link to the docs. The docs say:

Tag values are limited to 255 characters, except for <itunes:summary>, which can be up to 4000 characters. Don’t add leading or trailing spaces to your values.

In the RSS feed the <itunes:summary> gets truncated as well even though it can be 4000 characters instead of 255 like the others. Could just that attribute in the generated XML not get truncated so that podcast apps can view the longer summary?

Edit: Also, for what it is worth, there is no <description> attribute in the iTunes spec. It looks like <itunes:subtitle> is used for the brief description. Maybe <description> does not need to get truncated as well?

@brettchalupa: The description tag is not itunes specific, and is documented on http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html. It gets used if itunes:summary is not present. So I don't see a reason that we can't un-truncate the results from summary

In the past we did not do truncating on the descriptions at all, but we ran into issues with some podcast readers, or something. I'm reaching out to the developer who added it to find out the reason.

I certainly don't want to limit the feed if we don't have to.

@jslack Awesome, thanks for the detailed info. I appreciate you looking into it!

@jslack: While you are at it, can you take a look at the incorrect file sizes in the feed?

I think it it the length="12198" thing. That is supposed to be bytes but it looks like it is seconds. Every podcast seem to be about 10kB each, looks a bit wierd.

@forcen: Looking into it.

@forcen: Interesting. Looking into it.

@jslack

Hello,Is there an update on the RSS 'length' being video/podcast length in seconds and not filesize in bytes issue?

With the new API/download count limitations, it would be really nice if the RSS 'length' property were correct. Without it, one cannot know what the filesize to download is without burning a limited download allowance.

(I suppose I'm assuming a HTTP HEAD request burns an allowance just like a GET. But I'm not particularly interested in testing the theory and losing access to download videos for 24 hours...)

Edit: I actually did the test. A HTTP HEAD request does consume a download allowance. So the need for an accurate 'length' property is real.

Thanks!

@escapingminos: Agreed, this is affecting me as well. I no longer work at CBSi, so hopefully someone else can give the feed some love :) They are really busy though, I'm sure.

Has this issue ever been discussed further? It seems to be cut off on apple podcasts, downcast, Spotify. The podcast description is always cut off at a certain point