Craigslist blocking Feedly again

It looks like craigslist is once again blocking Feedly from accessing its RSS feeds. This happened a few months ago when Feedly traffic apparently got high enough to hit an automated block on craigslist’s end. They made some changes to reduce their traffic, and things started working again… until now. As far as I know there’s no official word from craigslist, but it seems likely that Feedly has simply grown to the point where they’re hitting the block again.

Unfortunately this means that at the moment RSS feeds from craigslist (like the ones from our RSS Feeds Tool) are not updating on Feedly. Most likely they will get this sorted out in the next few weeks, but if you don’t want to wait, there are a couple options. First off, other popular readers, such as NewsBlur and TheOldReader appear to be working for now, although as people move over from Feedly it likely won’t be long before they’re having the same problems.

A long-term solution, although with a bit more effort, would be to host your own RSS server. If you like NewsBlur, you can actually self-host it on your own server (or home computer), which will not only avoid getting caught up in these kinds of blocks, it will also save you the annual subscription fee. Code an installation instructions can be found on Github here.

Another popular option with a bit more detailed installation instructions is TinyTinyRSS. There’s a primer on MakeUseOf here. Whichever reader you choose, self-hosted or not, you should be able to import the OPML files generated by SearchTempest’s RSS Feeds Tool. Let us know how it goes in the comments!

Edit: It sounds like a number of people have been having trouble lately with self-hosted RSS as well. This thread at TheOldReader might shed some light. Apparently craigslist recently made a change to how they redirect RSS urls, which TheOldReader says isn’t supported by many other readers. So if your RSS reader isn’t picking up craigslist feeds, you might want to ask them to look into that.

5 thoughts on “Craigslist blocking Feedly again

  1. Razxr

    Netvibes does not have the problem with craigslist feeds that seems to be plaguing the other popular RSS readers. Which is a shame since although I have been using both Netvibes & feedly, feedly is my 1st choice.

  2. stephen

    I think craigslist is actually blocking RSS feeds for all. they stopped working in my TTRSS system recently.

    1. Nathan Post author

      Huh, that’s really surprising. I can’t imagine why they would just turn their feeds off completely, and unless you’re consuming a truly massive number of feeds I can’t see why you would be hitting an automated block on a self-hosted system.

        1. Nathan Post author

          I don’t have any inside knowledge, but I certainly wouldn’t think so. You might want to check out the Craigslist help forum to see if it’s a bug.

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