Paid Account Trials cannot create new syndicated accounts. This is intentional, and not a bug. If a user on a Paid Account Trial asks about creating a syndicated account, you can gently nudge them to purchase the real thing.
These were both added to address a new source of requests for us, people going "OMG GOOGLE READER HAS ALL MY PROTECTED ENTRIES" and acting like they've uncovered a terrible secret that we're in cahoots with Google to pass off private entries (we're not. at least not until their check clears).
So, if a request comes in where someone is concerned about a 3rd-party service or about RSS exposing their protected entries in general, you can point them to the new FAQ and apply the new stock as appropriate.
In other news, do any of you have edits you'd like to see to the stocks/to the FAQs/is there anything I can do to make you being in syn more fun (or to get you involved in syn, if you're not already)? Please comment to this request (I've screened comments) and I will try to make your wish come true for Christmas.
Effective immediately, all syn supporthelps will also receive the canview:entryprops priv as part of their priv package. This priv will permit you to view meta-information about entries by going to this page and pasting in an entry link.
Syn-wise, the useful lines are mostly:
User Date/Time: 2009-02-20 05:00:00 Server Date/Time: 2009-02-20 05:22:49
User date/time is the date and time that were listed in the feed, and server date/time is the time synsuck ran and posted the entry to LJ. syn_id is the GUID or other unique ID that LiveJournal picked up for the entry, and syn_link is the <link> attribute's information. For an outstanding guide to reading entryprops output, check this post to support_interim.
Of course, you're being given the priv to do syn stuff, there may be sensitive information exposed through entryprops, abuse of the tool will you get whomped, etc. etc.
As the user mentioned, the profile page for zakhad_blog mentioned that the last fetch resulted in an error '404 Not Found' -- but if you clicked on the 'XML' button on the profile, you could see content in your browser.
After a bit of digging, including a command-line utility (I used lwp-request, which comes with Perl's LWP package), I found something weird: when I fetched the feed, I got data, yes. But when I added some debugging flags to show me the HTTP status, it told me "404 Not Found"! A bit more digging with netcat and speaking raw HTTP to the server (always fun ^^~) corroborated that.
So it appears that the server, for whatever reason, was delivering data, but with a status code indicating that there was no data there! My browser, apparently, figured that if the content was not text/html (likely an error page) but text/xml, then there was indeed content despite the status code; but LiveJournal, apparently, chose to trust the status code (as I think it should have).
Fortunately, the user was able to provide an alternate feed location which behaved properly (returning '200 OK' as its HTTP status), and I used syn_editurl to change the feed URL to the new URL. In related news, if anyone is interested in a quick tutorial in using lwp-request and/or netcat to diagnose syn-related problems, let me know. If there's interest, I'll try to make time to write something down about what I do.
(I use a Unix shell for this, but Perl runs on Windows, too, and I wouldn't be surprised if netcat had been ported to Windows as well, so the information might be applicable even if you don't have access to a Unix shell but 'only' a Windows command line.)
(This post was migrated from the syn_training community, originally made by seaofdestiny. Please excuse the friends page mess!)
This support request reminded me of something which I learned and which might come in handy.
The user is talking about 'translation', and it appears that 'syndication' is what we'd call it.
This is probably due to the Russian terminology in this area; 'syndication' appears to be translated as 'трансляция' (translyatsiya) in Russian, and a 'syndicated account' as 'трансляционный аккаунт' (translyatsionnyj akkaunt) or 'транслируемый аккаунт' (transliruyemyj akkaunt). So this is standard Russian terminology on LiveJournal (don't know about on the wider Internet).
My Russian is limited to recognizing a word here and there so I don't know whether the words are related to the English words 'translation/transliteration', but occasionally you'll see a support request from a Russian speaker mentioning that they want to 'translate their blog to LiveJournal' or create a 'translated account'. Now you'll know what they're likely to mean with that.
For Syndicated Accounts that aren't updating because of the "Too Big" error, we (the admins) now have a tool available to us that lets us flag the feed to update anyway, as long as it is less than 500 KB in size. Therefore, please don't say "Sorry, the limit's 300K, [FAQ]" for feeds that are between 300 and 500 KB - just leave them for an admin to fix. If you want to be super-helpful, IC with the feed file size.
If the feed is more than 500 KB in size, feel free to say "the FAQ says they can only be so big" and to handle them as before.
If you have questions about the policy, please e-mail us at support@.
What follows below is an overview and a line-by-line walkthrough of
the part of the LiveJournal source code which handles the retrieval
of RSS feeds, conversion to journal entries, and storage of those
entries in the LiveJournal database.
Understanding this document is not required of Syndication
volunteers. I expect that most volunteers will not use this,
or maybe will find the overview interesting. It's a reference I
wrote up to help me diagnose one problem a long time ago, and I
figured I might as well make it public.
(That said, I encourage anyone to comment with questions, requests
for clarifications, and so forth, even if you think your question
is silly.)
calm
