Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Feedburner FAILS to deliver to email subscribers

Feedburner is behaving in a completely bizarre way at the moment:
  • On some days it does not NOT send my blog posts to email subscribers on the day they're written
  • Instead, it delays them and then sends them to you several days later! For example, I've only just received those written on 30th - The little book of drawing - and 31st October - Urban Sketchers officially starts tomorrow.
  • Just in case you didn't notice the later delivery, it then keeps sending some of late ones them to you - again and again - as it did with The colour of weather and time which was posted on the 9th October, but didn't turn up in my inbox until last Saturday and then again yesterday!) I'm rather hoping we don't get the same repeat delivery with the two posts from the end of October.
If this has happened to any of you please add a comment below.
I'm writing this so that the hundreds of readers who subscribe to this blog via Feedburner email know that I am just as puzzled and as irritated by the behaviour of the email feed as I'm sure some of you are.

I have a hunch it might be connected to posting from the same computer and the same ISP on more than one blog on the same day. Which, if I'm correct, is a major boo-boo on the part of Feedburner.

Aberrations have always happened from time to time and hopefully the people at Feedburner will get their act together pretty soon. I've found in the past that posting about it on my blog after the mistakes start to stack up tends to achieve a better 'fix' than writing to the Feedburner team. They used to be great..........until they got taken over by Google! (Dear Feedburner - I will keep posting about this until it stops happening!).

It's quite difficult to keep up with mishaps and malfunctions relating to Feedburner - especially as they seem to happen more and more. The Feedburner blog Burning Questions (Hah!) - burned out and stopped dead in its tracks back in May this year. Instead you're supposed to pick your way through all the threads in the Feedburner Google Help group to find out what the current status is. It has a known problems and current workarounds link - it's just not up to date!!!

Bad. As in not good customer service.

...and the answer is, if I dig deep, that I'm not alone. I've found threads from other bloggers who use feedburner for their email feed and they are also reporting that the feed for feedreaders is working fine but the feed for email subscribers is having a major problem.

Tip: If you're not already doing so, can I recommend that you get an alert to when this sort of thing happens by subscribing to your own blog through the feed options offered on your site. That way you know what sort of experience your readers are getting and whether the feed is being delivered on time.

My normal post for today will follow shortly...........

4 comments:

  1. Hi Katherine. Yes, my Feedburner stats have been disappearing, reappearing, then gone again since last Friday. I finally got so fed up I installed Statcounter on both blogs. I did get repeat deliveries of your Oct 9 post as well. BTW, Terry Muira has changed his blog address-he's on Blogger now.

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  2. Hi Katherine, I was wondering what was going on with the deliveries. Also, I use Statcounter on my blog as it seems to be more accurate. I have feedburner, but I really am wondering if the info is real as it seems so inconsistent.

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  3. Looks like it's more than just a few of us who are affected!

    I don't use Feedburner for stats at all. I find Statcounter and Google Analytics both provide much better information.

    My count for no. of visitors comes from Statcounter.

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  4. Seems mine came on time!!!
    carol

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