Public Feed Update Progress

Hey folks! Kaye here. A couple of weeks ago I posted an announcement that we're moving our audio hosting entirely to Patreon for both our Public and Premium shows alike (the free shows are still free and accessible via RSS just like before!). The process is going smoothly now and I'm doing it a few hundred episodes at a time, as I get opportunities to go in and fix titles and stuff.

I got a message from someone saying that their podcast feed was being inundated with old episodes that they've had to delete one at a time. This sucks! I don't want it to happen. It shouldn't be happening with existing public feeds you're already subscribed to because of how the import works (the "guid" field in the XML file remains the same, telling your podcast app that an imported episode should not be considered "new").

HOWEVER, adding episodes on Patreon will make the combined Patreon premium feed, which most of you are subscribed to, show old episodes as new. I cannot think of anything I can do to avoid this happening on my end, other than not making the migration.

Many podcast apps don't treat episodes with publish dates from a long time ago as new, and won't mark them as unplayed or download them automatically. As far as I can tell, this is the case for Overcast (the app that I use), Apple Podcasts, or Pocket Casts (the three apps I use to test things on iOS). I cannot speak to how Android apps treat things differently, though the FAQs for Podcast Addict detail how to change settings per show including setting automatic episode cleanup for podcasts older than a certain date.

If you're running into this problem of new episodes flooding your feeds, please check to see if your podcast app has a way to change its settings per feed, at least for the next couple of weeks as I move things over.

This is all a long way of saying "Pardon Our Dust". This will make things better in the end! I swear!

To give a progress update, in the past two weeks I've consolidated Gary's old short run shows Heartbeat City, Pilot Season, and Dead Idea Valhalla into the Duckfeed Presents feed. File Under Water and Best Quality Vacuum now live entirely on Patreon. For bigger shows, all of The Level is now on Patreon (along with its precursor show, Stand Under the Don't Tree and Riddle Me This), and I'm on the verge of having Abject Suffering all squared away on here as well.

I had a call with Patreon to discuss a concern I had about the hybrid Public/Premium shows being migrated, but that has all been squared away and those will be my next targets.

That's the status so far. Have a great weekend! I'll be spending mine getting episodes moved.

Kaye