Forum Discussion
Useless headlines
Why does Hughesnet open with a series of suggested news stories, but when the user clicks on them, he is informed "page not found"? If you are not providing access to these stories, why feature them...
I just tried a bunch and they all worked. If they aren't, it's most likely that the address of the story changed or something of that nature. I believe the stories are put on the page by an automated system, so it's likely that the problem is at the source rather than HughesNet.
I found one of the stories by going to the source, so I imagine it's possible that the source changed the URL and that the feed was trying to pull from the old URL. Not sure if HN can do anything about that.
maratsade wrote:I found one of the stories by going to the source, so I imagine it's possible that the source changed the URL and that the feed was trying to pull from the old URL. Not sure if HN can do anything about that.
That happens a lot: The news aggregator scans a site, picks up a new post, adds the headline and URL to their RSS feed, which gets used to build the page that you see. Original news source decides to change the headline (typo, error, etc.) without keeping the URL the same (sometimes its automatically changed), and the aggregator doesnt pick up the change or new URL. You end up with a busted link appearing on the page. Oversimplifying the process, but that's basically it.
Happens to the site I work on with NewsNow all the time.
This must be exactly what happened when the OP was trying to access specific stories. I only followed up on one of the titles s/he PMd me and ended up finding it by going to the source publication, but I bet the same happened to the others.
Am I right in thinking Hughesnet can't do much, if anything at all, about this?
maratsade wrote:Am I right in thinking Hughesnet can't do much, if anything at all, about this?
Absolutely nothing, because they have no control over the content of the RSS feeding the page, coming from the news aggregator. All comes down to the info that comes from the aggegrator's automated agents, scanning the web sites.
