I submitted an e-mail to Access via the contact/support channels earlier this year regarding RSS feed links being broken, and was told it would be looked into. I even reported exactly why the links in the RSS feeds don't work, and what needed to be done to fix it. I got a response along the lines of "we'll look into it" but never heard anything back. I'm posting here in the hopes that somebody from Access will take notice and make this *very* simple fix, as the forum RSS feeds are currently useless.
As it stands, the RSS feeds link to what I assume is an old domain (http://www.access-music.de). However, this domain currently is setup to 302 redirect ALL requests for this domain to just http://virus.info. There is no regex or anything that attempts to remap URLs to the new domain, even though the actual path of the URLs hasn't changed!
For example, a link from the feed today to a thread on OS 5.0.1 links to
http://www.access-music.de/forum/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=4147- this URL doesn't exist, and instead the user is sent to the base http://virus.info page. However just changing http://www.access-music.de to virus.info and leaving everything else the same works just fine. So http://virus.info/forum/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=4147 goes where it's supposed to.
This is very easily fixed in one (or both) of two ways.
- Adjust the settings in the forum software so that it knows it lives at virus.info and not at http://www.access-music.de. That way all future links will be correct.
- Make a small config addition to the web server so that any requests to http://www.access-music.de are automatically redirected to the same URL, but on virus.info.
Either of these will fix the problem. This will also fix the issue tomf posted regarding e-mail links not working (http://virus.info/forum/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=3767).
The best approach would be to do both of them. If the domain http://www.access-music.de isn't going to be referenced anymore, then the forum shouldn't know about it. And option 2 not only solves the broken forum e-mail/RSS links issue, it also would fix the problem of any old links to the Access site not working.
As it stands, there is no point in having the RSS feeds as an option, because they don't even work. This is a simple fix that literally will take no more than five minutes, please Access!
