Numerous bloggers are reporting issues with Bloglines again today. I’ve been noticing it for at least 24 hours here – folders that say they have unread items that when you click on them have nothing in them as well as other folders that seem to be empty but which actually do have items in them.
I can’t see any notifications from Bloglines that explain it but something is definitely wrong from what I can see. I just hope I’m not losing the unread items that it’s missing when they do fix the problem.
Others noticing problems – here, here and here.
Update: It seems that Bloglines have written something about their problem but those of us with it probably didn’t get the message – as our Bloglines isn’t working! The explanation is:
“We are aware that some users have been seeing inaccurate counts on their subscription lists. This is related to the maintanance we performed Wednesday, August 3rd which included upgrades to our databases. Unfortunately, due to the massive amount of data we store, many of the systems are taking a few days to catch up with work. There is no loss of data or functionality, but the sheer size of the synchronization is causing the inaccuracies in count to occur. We are working to speed up the synchronization and remove this bottleneck from the system in the future. In the meantime, we apologize for this inconvenience and disruption to your Bloglines reading rituals.”
I’m not sure if this is the issue that I’m having but it does seem to be taking quite a while to fix. I’m seeing quite bizarre results – one minute folders seem to have unread items, the next they don’t. Hopefully things will be back to normal shortly.
I have been hearing the same thing although i can’t say for sure since i stick with newsgator usually. There does however seem to have been a lot of posts recently to the bloglines blog about maintenance and downtime and the cynic in me did wonder whether right now bloglines move on feed access standards and privacy isn’t just a diversionary tactic to distract the masses.
I am sure you’re aware of it: Google Reader. In my opinion it’s the best athough I recently had a few problems with it as well. Reader was showing an ‘Oops an error..’ and this caused read-items being shown as unread. But in general I find the interface of Reader a lot quicker and the non-folder based view better. It also supports all kinds of formats. Since the first beta, Reader supports embedded media (audio) for example which works great.
The problem is annoying! Hopefully Bloglines straightens this out quickly.
I suppose that if Bloglines has several databases split over a number of machines (which I suspect it will, given the number of subscribers and feeds they store) then it might take a while to syncronise everything, particularly if they’re updating the numbers using COUNT() or something similar. I know from experience that on tables with hundreds of millions of rows this can take quite some time, although I would have thought that the problem would be fixed by now as this is the third day that I’ve been experiencing it.
It’s about 2 days old from a big downtime they had Friday (which they did warn about). When the site came back it went haywire, “cannot connect to db” messages etc, but it seems to be ok to me now, but I’m on it non stop so someone who only logs in every day or two would only be noticing the issues now.
Yup! I’ve been experience wierd things with Bloglines in the last four days. It made me wonder whether my blog-friends have went on vacation all at the same time or not. Then folders show unread items, I check them out their empty. Sometimes you get the same entry you’ve read yesterday still flagged as unread.
Hope they fix this very very soon. My RSS reading rituals are about to break down completely.
Hmm – I’ve been trying to access mine for two days straight with very strange results.
Seems to be settling just now though.
Their explanation coincides with my experience of the problems, and even though it is still occurring – as in moments ago – it does seem to be through the worst of it.
Until you posted this though I was actually blaming my browser.
Got the same happening here, it is working on and off. I guess this is the risk in using web services, we always have the choice to export OPML and go elseware though.
I wish there was an alternative to bloglines, but I like the fact that it’s web-based, and I’ve tried “Newshutch” – the one that’s supposed to be all web 2.0 looking and all, but didn’t like the interface as much…..
Anyone found a decent alternative?
I’m both, a Bloglines aggregator user as well as someone who uses Bloglines for blogging and i have the same problem for days now.
I one moment everything is ok, in the next moment my Blog is *gone*; like on the mainpage of a Bloglines-blog you got a value like “138 Items” – that one suddenly goes down to zero – and if you hit reload it comes back to some 138 but no blog appears.
Then, if you fire up the main page of my blog you get an the overview of the month, if you click on any other article – like http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ITnomad?id=137 – it’s not there. Hit reload 20 times, eventually it will appear.
This is crazy and driving me absolutely mad, considering that i got constant problems with Technorati as well.
I’m mad, really really mad.
*sigh*
I go and get me a bottle of beer,
have a nice weekend,
Alexander.
Update: Now my blog is completly gone.
Opened a bottle of beer and i’m seriously thinking of moving my blog.
Any advice where to go, what to use, how much i should spend?
Thanks,
Alexander.
itnomad: get your own domain and hosting and use WordPress. You will not regret it.
As for Bloglines, I was up late a couple days ago and kept seeing the “Bloglines Plumber” in my feeds list on the left. It kept happening so much I was about ready to save the image and do a photoshop of him getting shot in the head.
I haven’t liked any single other reader I’ve tried, more than Bloglines, but when it has problems, it’s really frustrating to a great many people.
Seems to be working now. Got a lot to catch up on though. I got absolutely no new articles for nearly 13 hours, and now I have over 120…
[…] It seems that I’m not the only one experiencing some problems and weird things with Bloglines as even ProBlogger Darren Rowse has also noticed them in the last 24 hours. Lucky him, I’ve been noticing some problems and bugs in Bloglines since last week. […]
Yes. I noticed first that some feeds would not show any postings when I click on them. That has been happening for a few days now. And then, last night, for hours, nothing seems to show up as new and unread and with over 1000+ feeds, I KNOW that it’s not possible.
So, I went to read at Rojo, which is obviously not as good as Bloglines. I have not been able to find a true Bloglines clone that allows me to just click on a folder and view everything on the right, regardless of how many posts or entries. I hate having to keep clicking to view posts. I just want a one click reader and Bloglines is still the only one that allows me to view the feeds with one click
Experiencing the same thing STILL here. Yesterday from about 3pm in the afternoon to 12am my feeds never updated once. It showed all subscriptions as being empty (which they weren’t).
Still getting feeds saying they have 1 new item, but nothing really being there, and than one feed that is frequently updated is marked as having NO new items, yet when i click on it there is actually a number in the 40s!
So frustrating. :(
Glad to see it wasn’t just me. And I like the idea of photoshopping that plumber!
Still love Bloglines best, hope it gets back to normal soon!!!
Michael: Thanks for the hint, did that – just “moved” my blog to http://itnomad.wordpress.com/.
However, since Bloglines doesn’t export old postings, i tried to hack a small perl-script together to extract the date, title and text from a posting; however, XML::Parser completly stomped over the bad HTML Bloglines produces…
Anyway.
Anyway, WordPress seems to be quite nice.
Thanks, that was exactly the kind of motivation i needed…
Cheers, Alexander.
Why is everyone getting pissed off at bloglines? They offer a great *free* service that is rarely down. They have a bit of a hiccup today and suddenly everyone is mad. Aren’t we a priveleged bunch.
[…] Like many, many, many others, I’ve been affected by Bloglines’ recent problems – where not only are new feed items not showing up, but older “bookmarked” or in Bloglines terms, “Kept New” items have also disappeared. […]
whine: I agree with you – they got a great service if you use it for RSS-aggregation. But as your primary blogging-service – no, i disagree. I was blogging their for nearly two years; in the end i’m lucky that i finally got “out of here”.
However, i’ll keep Bloglines as my web-based RSS-aggregator because they’re really good at it!
Alexander.
Argh! This is sooo annoying. I can’t get any of my saved items to display. They must be somewhere — the numbers are showing in the parentheses on my feed list — but they do not display. I only get new items. Very, very irritational. Free, yes, but if I lose all those saved items, it’s not even worth nothing, is it?
I finally got an answer from Bloglines after three days about why my (former) blog is pretty much broken; sounds like a canned answer, doesn’t help at all: http://itnomad.wordpress.com/2006/08/08/bloglines-answers-to-database-problems/
Well, *sigh*
Alexander.
My feeds are still about 50% broken. I got the same crappy canned CS response as itnomad did. I’m activily looking for alternative web-based RSS aggregators, but have yet to find one I like. Any suggestions?
Still broken one week later.
I’ve had no posts from digg, lifehacker, the register or the inquirer for a week now.
Am actively trying “news is free” and google reader as this is becoming ridiculous (even if bloglines is a free service).
Bloglines has been broken for nearly two weeks now. No posts on all my favorite feeds for two weeks! I also got the canned response that they “are aware of it”. Looks like another great service is going away.
Now Bloglines is broken in a new way…! All of those feeds that haven’t been updating in a month now report in some cases *thousands* of messages unread. When I press “mark all unread”, they go to 0, but then if I click “My Feeds” to check again, they all come back. The good news is that they seem to be working on it. The bad news is that they’ve apparently hired chimps on crack to do their development.
Bloglines has been broken for over 4 weeks now. I briefly saw what Harlan described – thousands of new articles in every subscription, but that only lasted about a day and then it went back to zero new articles again. Still no response from Bloglines customer service.
Today I discovered quite by accident that if I unsubscribe to all the dead feeds and then resubscribe to them, they start working again. (This did not work the first time I tried it, a few weeks ago.)
So, despite hearing nothing from customer service, I have managed to get my Bloglines working again after only about a month of being down.
Sigh… the fix didn’t stick. Most of the feeds went dead again.
I have been hearing the same thing although i can’t say for sure since i stick with newsgator usually. There does however seem to have been a lot of posts recently to the bloglines blog about maintenance and downtime and the cynic in me did wonder whether right now bloglines move on feed access standards and privacy isn’t just a diversionary tactic to distract the masses.
So, despite hearing nothing from customer service, I have managed to get my Bloglines working again after only about a month of being down.
Bloglines has been broken for over 4 weeks now. I briefly saw what Harlan described – thousands of new articles in every subscription, but that only lasted about a day and then it went back to zero new articles again. Still no response from Bloglines customer service.