Radio: Duplicate podcast issue fixed?
For years, I have received occasional complaints from radio listeners in podcast format (iTunes, etc) that duplicates show up.
That is, some people were getting several copies of the same episode, sometimes spaced out over a few days. I can understand how that's annoying! Unfortunately, my attempts to look into it resulted in nothing. There was no solution to this presented anywhere on google, and in fact there were very few complaints of such a problem existing for any other show! The few similar complaints I found from other podcast providers had no answers or solutions.
I also couldn't duplicate the problem on my end, though I fully believed those reporting this to me.
Today we might have had a breakthrough and a fix. A listener reported that the "lastBuildDate" on the RSS feed was setting itself to the current date/time rather than the date/time of the publication of the last episode. In non-technical English, this means that the feed given to iTunes and other podcasting software was constantly claiming to be new, even if we hadn't released a new episode in several days. This wasn't due to anything I did wrong, but rather a longtime bug in the vBulletin podcasting software. This bug MIGHT be responsible for the duplicates.
Today, while hiding from the coronavirus, I dug into the vBulletin software and fixed the bug. Now it correctly sets "lastBuildDate" to the date and time I last posted a PFA episode.
If you still see the bug occurring where you get duplicate episodes, PLEASE let me know by texting 775-372-8355, or PMing me here. Thanks!
