Another new Micro.blog 3.2 beta is out for TestFlight. @vincent is tweaking the tags design and it’s looking really nice. I think we can probably ship this to everyone next week. And it’s a great time to try bookmarks and tagging in Micro.blog Premium if you haven’t upgraded yet.

@manton adding images for external blogs still not working. When adding an image to a post, it gives the error “Whoops an error occurred, please try again”.

The image appears to be in the post. I can add alt text to it. When I press the post button, the text will publish but the image is missing.

@kimonostereo Sorry, sounds like we're going to have to spin up another Movable Type server to test this more thoroughly.

@manton Hopefully an easy fix!

@manton Glad it is now consistent with the Mac app and the web.

@manton should I send you a video of the issue I’m seeing? If so, where do I send it to?

@kimonostereo Emailing to help@micro.blog is good. Thanks!

@manton ok! Sent!

@manton posted 2 hours ago and my posts still haven’t shown up on micro.blog. Is there a way to get them to show up without having to monitor or manually trigger micro.blog the settings?

@manton when I go into Edit Sources and Cross-posting, both of my feeds show Error: invalid RSS feed. When I attempt to re-add one, the previous feed then shows that it's fine?

@kimonostereo Looking into this. There is definitely an error when parsing the feed. Anything change recently with your feed? It doesn't validate using validator.w3.org, but the errors don't seem that critical either, to be honest.

@manton Not that I know of? I haven't touched them in quite a while. Strange that the original feed showed OK once I added it as an additional feed. I deleted the newer duplicate then the original was working again and the post showed up. Now it says invalid again. I'll check my feed structure today.

@manton my posts haven’t been showing up on the feed recently either (probably the last week or two). My feed also fails the validator (will work on that, but I’m not great at this stuff), but I’ve found if I go to Account → Feeds → Refresh it, it works and pushes my posts. // @kimonostereo

@humdrum @kimonostereo If refreshing the feed manually works, than the validation errors are not causing a problem. Must be something with our periodic checks for when feeds change. I just made one change that might help and will continue to investigate.

@manton thanks, Manton. First attempt seems to have worked for me!

@manton I fixed the issues in my feeds, but both still say invalid after reload. Should I re-add the feed?

@kimonostereo I don’t think re-adding the feeds will help but it can’t hurt either!

@manton I re-added them and they still show as error.

@manton Any tips on what I can do to get my feeds working again?

@kimonostereo Not yet. It’s gotta be something I can work around, but still not sure what changed.

@manton I hope you find a solution. I can't post to micro.blog until it's fixed!

@kimonostereo Sorry, finally figured it out. I hadn't noticed when I tested before that Micro.blog is getting a special response that is not actually the RSS feed. It's an HTML page that says "Please wait while your request is being verified". This must be being added to your blog by your hosting provider. Maybe there's a security feature that can be disabled?

@manton Hmmm. That's odd! Is it possibly from cloudflare?

@kimonostereo Yes, very possibly. I did some searching and some of the matches were from Cloudflare customers. Maybe you can temporarily disable the Cloudflare proxy if you’re using that?

@manton OK i've disabled the proxy for now. Do you know if it's possible to whitelist micro.blog on Cloudflare?

@manton Looks like the feeds are working again! So I guess Cloudflare was blocking it. I looked in CF Firewall events and couldn't see anything that looked like micro.blog getting blocked. Not sure what to do to allow micro.blog access to the feeds.

@manton Oh! Looking in Cloudflare WAF section, there are IP Access Rules that I've used in the past to allow IFTTT access to my website without having that block. Maybe this can be done for micro.blog as well via IP or AS number?

@kimonostereo That sounds like a good thing to try. Do you mind following up in email and I will send you the IP addresses for our servers, where feed crawling is coming from? It could change in the future but isn't likely to anytime soon.

@manton sure! Sent.

@manton I added the IPs you sent and reactivated the Cloudflare Proxy. I thought it worked at first, but now I’m seeing the same issue as before with invalid RSS feed error. So i guess it didn’t work. I sent you a follow up email with a screenshot of the Cloudflare settings.

@manton also, what is interesting is that I don't see micro.blog IPs in Cloudflare's security events log as a managed challenge or block. Turning off Cloudflare's proxy fixes it, but I wonder what else it could be.

@manton sorry to keep bothering you about stuff. I upgraded to a new iPhone and now the micro.blog iOS app won't allow me to connect my external blog. Errors: 1. Sorry, we could not find the XML-RPC endpoint or Micropub API for your weblog. 2. An error occured trying to connect. Please try again. 3. Whoops, an error occured trying to connect. Please try again.

All of these occur one after the next after tapping OK.

@manton not sure what you did, but I noticed that my feeds no longer have an error. Did you figure it out? Still can't sign in to my external blog via the iOS app and I'm afraid to try on the Mac app…

@kimonostereo Sorry this keeps happening. I think at this point it's out of our control. Disabling the Cloudflare proxy fixes it, right?

@manton I just checked the micro.blog feeds section and it seems like it's working again? It's like it's intermittent? I didn't touch anything on my end.

@manton I've been working on this issue and have had some help from the Cloudflare community. I put some changes into my Cloudflare settings, but micro.blog still says invalid RSS feed. Could you tell me what you are seeing on your end when you access either of my two external blog feeds? This is the thread showing my settings if you're interested: community.cloudflare.com/t/service...

@kimonostereo Thanks for following up on this again. I just checked and Micro.blog is getting a "Please wait while your request is being verified" HTML page. Here's the full response with JavaScript bits that Cloudflare is adding.

@manton the person helping me on the Cloudflare forums did some sleuthing and can see that it's Imunify360 that is blocking micro.blog IPs. They suggested that you contact them to see if there is something that can be fixed? More details and findings here: community.cloudflare.com/t/service...

@manton Still working on this one. I tried to get my hosting provider to configure their Imunify360 firewall to not block micro.blog, but they said there is nothing they can do about it. Aside from trying to find out why Imunify360 is blocking micro.blog IPs, I am at a loss at what to do.

@kimonostereo I've reviewed the Cloudflare thread again. I've also discovered it's an issue even from our servers that never make requests to feeds, meaning Imunify360 is blocking unrelated servers. If your hosting provider can't remove IP blocks, can they disable the security check for all pages on your blog? If you want to cc me on any emails to them I can try to help.

@manton thanks Manton! I can ask if that's possible. Should I cc help@micro.blog?

@kimonostereo Sure, help email is good.

@manton They dropped you off the reply. I've forwarded their response to help@micro.blog with some details.

@manton Please let me know if you need me to keep ModSecurity off on my web host. If you have any other suggestions on stuff I could do to help resolve this, I'd love to hear them.

@manton did you change something on micro.blog? My RSS feeds started working yesterday! Still seem to be working this morning.

@kimonostereo That's good! But no, I can't take credit... I didn't change anything related to the feeds.

@manton guess I spoke too soon. It's broken again. Bleh.

@manton It's me again! I think another issue I'm encountering that coincides with micro.blog being blocked by Imunify360 is that I cannot add my external blog to the micro.blog apps. My mac client works, but it was already added prior to all of this happening. My phone and iPad are not able to connect in order to add the blog.

@manton Since I can't reliably post here, I was wondering if there is a way to pause my subscription?

@kimonostereo We don't have a pause, so probably best to just cancel it. We won't delete anything, so it's effectively the same thing as pausing. Really wish we had a solution to that RSS download / Cloudflare problem.

@manton thanks Manton. I just set things up on that webhost, so I won't be moving for a bit. I'll need to investigate other options if it RSS can't be fixed. I also can't sign in to the micro.blog apps on my new phone. All of the other places that I'm already signed in are fine.