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Authentication glitch when redirected

2006-01-21
2012-08-29
  • Nobody/Anonymous

    Summary of bug: RSSOwl doesn't remember passwords for HTTP redirected feeds.

    Details:
    First off, RSSOwl is awesome and I love it.

    Now with that out of the way, I noticed a problem lately and finally tracked down a fix. It looks like LiveJournal recently added subdomains for all accounts, which results in a HTTP redirect, even for feeds. It causes:

    [1] http://www.livejournal.com/~sam/data/rss?auth=digest

    Being redirected to:

    [2] http://sam.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest

    This is all and good, and RSSOwl properly handles the redirect, but it doesn't properly handle authentication when this happens. LiveJournal uses the auth=digest parameter to allow users to view friends-only posts by logging in. The problem is that, if you use url [1], RSSOwl will ask for the auth password every time it checks the feed, even if you tell it to remember the login info. If you enter the password correctly, it updates properly. The workaround from a user standpoint is to use the destination url [2] as the feed url, which will allow RSSOwl to properly remember the password. However, it took me a while to track down this problem and I'd imagine that less interested users would simply view it as an unsolvable bug.

    I'm guessing there is a glitch in RSSOwl that is causing it to associate the saved password with the wrong domain (www.livejournal.com) instead of the one used at the destination url [2] (sam.livejournal.com). It handles the redirect properly, but doesn't save the password properly.

    Just wanted you folks to know. I don't know who "sam" is; I just picked a random name :)

     
    • Nobody/Anonymous

      Yes, fixed for 1.2.1.

      Ben

       
    • Anonymous

      Anonymous - 2006-01-21

      Thanks for the detailed post. This is a well known issue, at least to me, maybe not to all users. I will update RSSOwl's FAQ on what to do in this case. For the next major release of RSSOwl, this should be fixed.

      Ben

       
    • Anonymous

      Anonymous - 2006-01-22

      Looks like I am able to fix this annoying bug for RSSOwl 1.2.1.

      Ben

       

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