Feedburner sucks (Part 2 - Part 1)

(Long story short, my new RSS feed url is: http://gssq.blogspot.com/atom.xml)


Feedburner (or rather, Google) is pissing me off again.

As moving my feed wasn't working, and their technical support was totally broken (or rather, non-existent), I decided to try deleting my old feed and burning a new one.

Lo and behold, when I tried to create my new feed in the same location as the old one (to avoid losing my 230+ subscribers), I was told that "The uri "Balderdash" is already taken. Please choose another."

Meanwhile, visiting the old URI gave me the error message:

"There has been an error of some kind. Ack!
FeedBurner could not deliver this feed to you because of the specific problem listed below:

Feed Address: http://feedproxy.google.com/Balderdash

HTTP Error (Code) and Message: (404) Feed not found error: FeedBurner
cannot locate this feed URI.

What can I do about this?

1. If you are a potential or current subscriber, contact the publisher to notify them that their feed content is not available. This may be temporary problem that requires their intervention to resolve, or the publisher may have permanently removed the feed from FeedBurner.
2. If you are the publisher of this feed, sign into FeedBurner and visit your feed's “Troubleshootize” tab to view FeedMedic, our automated diagnostic report for your feed. A cause for the problem, and tips for troubleshooting it, may be found there."

Unfortunately there was no option:

"3. Report the bug in our system to us"

because there is no way of contacting Feedburner technical support.

It's been almost 2 days since I first encountered this problem. Needless to say, my reporting of this bug was ignored.

As such, I am announcing a new RSS feed location, at http://gssq.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Please update your RSS readers.

You might notice that this redirects to a Feedburner feed, but this is purely because I want to keep track of how many subscribers I have. If Feedburner screws me over again, all I need to do is turn off Blogger's feed redirect and burn a new feed. Unless they manage to amaze me by finding some new way to shaft me.

Perhaps the best part of this story is that to see if they'd solved my original problem, I tried changing the address of my Comments feed. Amazingly, it worked! Not so amazingly, when I tried changing the address back, it claimed the original address was in use *facepalm* This is indeed a case where two wrongs can cancel out. As such, I am deleting the site's comments feed. If you want it back, any of the 10 of you can buzz me and I'll look to resurrecting it.


Considering that it's more than a year since Google acquired Feedburner, acquisition-related issues should long have been resolved.

Yet, the signin page for Feedburner (you have to click "Sign in" - the URL seems to be tied to your session) *still* prompts you to sign in with your old username and password, before then making you sign in *again* with your Google Account.

Meanwhile, Feedburner's Contact Us page (which is only accessible from their error page, and not their main page) points you to their forums, which in turn point you to the Google's No Man's Land aka Support Forums.

The fact that the Feedburner blog has not been updated since end August (it used to be updated a lot more, from the archives) might hint at some trouble in their household.