Phantom deactivation of Nuke Feeds

Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 6:00 pm

Greetings one and all,

Recently I have noticed that Nuke Feeds seems to like to deactivate. I have seen this occur in different websites at different times. ALL I have to do is reactivate the Feeds from modules admin and all is good to go. I have a network of portals with heavy RSS feed inter-linking. All of the affected portals but one are upgraded versions of v2.10.00 to 2.20.01. The other one is an out of the box install of 2.20.01.
Any advice?

Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6432

I haven't seen this happen, and don't believe this is possible through normal operation - only through administration. How often are feeds maintained?

Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 4:41 am

no maint I know of. All I know is I have sen it drop out of random sites on occasion. All I have to do is reactivate the feed at the portal module admin window and the feed is retored. Otherwise the inmporting site shows an arror message in its place.

Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 5:44 am

So the feed itself actually has its Status changed to "Inactive" or is it that the feed does not appear to be changing the content? I've never seen the former, but have seen the latter where the cache wasn't getting refreshed.

Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 6:24 am

Sounds like the latter. Reactivating (making inactive, then active) may solve the problem, but it has nothing to do with the feed being inactive. Next time it happens, just remove the cache files from the cache directory.

Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 11:26 am

Let me try to clarify in re-reading my posts I am not certain I have been clear.

One of the most powerful and often overlooked functions of the RavenNuke Portal (IMHO) is it’s superior management of RSS News feeds. In my network of portals my clients swap news feeds. It is one of the first things I teach them the how and why to do once their portal is active.

The intermittent problem I am seeing much simplified is the news feed from abc.com is displayed in right side blocks @ zyx.com and xyz.com. xyz.com and zyx.com will display a message saying no valid news feed or something close to that. (I don’t have the error message and didn’t think to copy it) abc.com does not display the Feed Icon in the admin menu nor is it visible in the modules block as a visible, invisible, or inactive item. Backend.php displays a module not active window. Ultramode.txt works.

I waited most of the day Saturday to see if it would fix itself, it did not.. To get the news feed working again I go to the admin menu modules administration menu (modules and add-ons). There I will see the feeds as invisible and inactive. I activate the module again and presto zyx.com and xyz.com have a working news feed and backend.php brings up the news.

I have seen this intermittently in no specific portal, meaning in more than one but no pattern I can determine. This past Saturday two of my portals did it on the same day. One of them was my main portal and I am 100% certain that the feed module was not accidentally or intentionally deactivated. One of them was a client who has become quite proficient at maintaining his portals and he says he did not deactivate his feed module. He has two RavenNuke Portals with me and maintains them both on his own. I am comfortable that he knows what he is doing with his portals.

If/when it happens again I will better document it and provide same here. Hopefully I have clarified what is happening.

Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 11:30 am

Wow - that's entirely different than what montego and I thought. The whole module is now inactive on abc.com - not just a specific feed?

I am not aware of any code that would cause that intentionally.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

I have seen this happen on 2 occasions with other modules but always the same modules which made it really weird. modules.php was actually changing the status because it can't access the index.php file and thinks it is deleted and does what it is programmed to do. The hosts involved were running processes that were temporarily locking the files or something (sorry this not recent) and modules.php would flip the switch. Could that be happening?

Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 5:39 am

Wow! That sure sounds like it could be.

Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 2:19 pm

I have posted about issues I have had with my host in the past. I'll submit a ticket. Last time they responded duh the portal code is written a lot better than we thought we fixed it or something like that.

Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 11:26 am

Were other modules made inactive?

Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 4:09 am

Not that I have noticed. Always the Nuke Feed module.

Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 5:32 am

That does not necessarily surprise me given what you said about how busy some of these sites are. If you are serving up feeds on the home pages of these things and they are very busy, and your host processes are running at the same time, feeds are being generated using the link feeds.html..., so going through modules.php.

Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 8:00 am

That's the same behavior I saw for those other 2 isolated incidents that I mentioned above. We set his site up on RWH and the peculiarity stopped but continued on his host's site. Since we were unable to isolate what specifically was causing it, I set up a special php script that kicked off every time anyone entered the site. It checked the active status of the module and turned it on if it was off. It also emailed me an alert and SMS messaged him. Then the weirdness got even more bizarre. As fast as the script would detect the inactive status and reset it the module would go inactive! We were being bombarded with alert emails about every 10 seconds! And this was a rather simple module which I had written from scratch. It was just an entry form into a contest. Only READ, SUBMIT, POST, WRITE. No editing or anything. His website was in the production phase but not really released to the public so traffic wasn't even a factor. Someway, somehow, it was tied to his hosting environment. At the time I did not have the resources to host the kind of traffic he was expecting once the site went live. So, we ended up doing all the development on one of my servers and never had the issue again. After development of the site was completed I put it back on his host and the problem persisted. I either turned off the email or throttled it back so he knew if/when there was a problem but the special script kept the module active. I ended up dropping him as a Client because he bilked me out of $3200. He was, however, recompensed for his screwing me. His company went bust and he lost way more than what he owed me ROTFL