Changing ttrss’s user-agent string to ‘Wget’ made the problem go away for me. I don’t think this is a valid permanent fix, of course, but it illustrates the scope of the problem. (I’ve noticed a few other non-tumblr sites have suddenly started refusing to serve rss unless the user-agent is something they like. Did this become an ill-considered Best Practice recently?)
Tested and confirmed. They’re stupid.
Fox, how hard/trivial might it be to add a user-agent setting per-feed in the Edit Feed window? Perhaps as another tab? If no new setting is provided, the default is used. I ask because I can see changing the user-agent as being very useful for a feed in trouble, but changing it globally for all feeds (including those not having a problem) feels too drastic.
not in stock but it would be a very simple plugin
Sorry, but how does one change User-Agent in tt-rss? Couldn’t find it in config.php.
It’s not in any config. You either alter the code for TTRSS, or you use the user agent plugin in this thread and alter the user agent in that for a solution that’s specific to tumblr. And if either of those are beyond you, you probably shouldn’t be doing that, because inevitably someone’s going to have to help you when something breaks.
You can define SELF_USER_AGENT in config.php before it’s defined in the core and TT-RSS will use that. It’s global though so it overrides every request.
A plugin to set it per-feed is a better solution. Using a fake user agent is bad form but sometimes it’s the only option available. I do it as well as some sites are just stupid.
Detest that condescending tone.
Thanks, JAMU. All clear.
gonna reiterate that its probably not the best idea to change this globally
I actually installed the tumblr_gdpr_ua plug in and just changed the user agent there. Worked like a charm, and only applies to tumblr sites.
What did you specifically change it to? I hit my own webserver with wget from another machine and plucked out the exact user agent string and it’s not working for me.
Wget/1.15 (linux-gnu)
Is that what you have, or similar? Or just the word “Wget”?
First I tried ‘wget’, which worked for tumblr, but prompted a 406 error from Joe.My.God. so I changed it to ‘Wget’, whereupon everything started working.
I’m contemplating whether it’d be worth the trouble to put together a plugin that detects when it’s being redirected to a non-RSS page and tries other popular user-agents until it gets a good answer
Thanks for the tip. I did some more digging and found that I had forgotten to enable the mod. It’s now working with the Wget/1.15 (Linux-gnu) user agent (and I’m sure would work with just Wget).
Did anyone get this working with safe mode filtered feeds?
Using tumblr_gdpr_ua, if i leave the UA as ‘googlebot’ I get 302 redirects to
If i change the UA to “Wget/1.15 (linux-gnu)” I get 303 redirects to
I’m not sure what UA I can use to get the rss feed!
Did anyone get this working with safe mode filtered feeds?
Yesterday it worked fine for me by changing the UA to “Wget”. But you are right, it seems like Tumblr changed something again.
Right now it is not working with any Tumblr-feed (safe mode filtered feeds or “normal” ones). Tested with new UA in a) the global config.php, b) tumblr_gdpr and c) tumblr_gdpr_ua.
Tested with “googlebot”, with the UA of wget and with the typical UA of Firefox. For me nothing is working anymore. Also new Tumblr-feeds can not be subscribed to anymore (error: “This URL does not contain a feed”).
Looks like Tumblr changed things again in the last few hours. I try to find more details.
Tumblr is annyoing…
It does seem to work with the Baidu UA (“Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)”). If you call curl from the command line you have to supply the -L parameter to follow the redirect.
Edit: It also works with the Facebook external hit UA: facebookexternalhit/1.0 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)
can confirm that Loewi’s ua options are working for me. Thank you very much well deserved 
Let’s see how long they’ll work.
Yes, lets see. Thank you very much for finding these (for now) working UAs!