Empty public feed

WriteFreely Instance Admins
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1

Hi!

I don’t know why, but since some weeks public feed from our instance has lost its posts (old and new posts). I don’t know where to look for. Any idea?

Thanks!

2

Hi @marcelcosta, do you mind sharing the instance you’re on? Assuming there’s no bug, other reasons could be that there have been no recent public posts.

3

Hi!

Sure, its https://blog.anartist.org

I’m certain that there have been recent posts (this last week).

It started not listing some of the new posts, but now it doesn’t show even the ones that were previously shown.

4

Hmm, do you see anything in the application logs that might hint at what’s happening, such as errors? Especially when the Reader hasn’t been accessed in a while and it tries to fetch new posts? You should be able to see when this happens by looking for log messages that include [READ] at the beginning of them, for example:

[READ] Updating post cache
5

Hi @matt,

Yes I can see this line in the logs:

Aug  1 07:20:46 blog writefreely[323244]: 2025/08/01 07:20:46 [READ] Updating post cache
7

I am trying to understand why it doesn’t show anything.

From read.go file line 70 FetchPublicPosts function, if I execute in mysql:

SELECT p.id, c.id, p.title, p.created 
FROM collections c 
LEFT JOIN posts p ON p.collection_id = c.id LEFT JOIN users u ON u.id = p.owner_id WHERE c.privacy = 1 AND (p.created <= '2025-08-06 14:50:00' AND pinned_position IS NULL) AND u.status = 0 ORDER BY p.created DESC LIMIT 10;

It returns:


+------------+-----+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| id         | id  | title                                                                       | created             |
+------------+-----+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| ruw2cb8p6i |   2 | Test                                                                        | 2025-08-06 14:15:37 |
| r0o4sca4b5 |  95 | Celebrando el Shabbath sin ser judío                                        | 2025-08-05 22:09:33 |
| 7wsi4nevmq | 161 | Olores en las nubes                                                         | 2025-08-03 16:00:45 |
| 7am0t3tuli | 161 | Canciones de corazón                                                        | 2025-08-03 16:00:18 |
| rlcyh00pj5 | 159 | “Prefiero ser un cerdo a ser un fascista” Despotricando sobre un meme.      | 2025-08-02 17:26:40 |
| 1cdsnuws9d | 161 | Cambios y movimiento                                                        | 2025-07-29 16:00:00 |
| wkctdg7mhz | 161 | Miedo al monstruo                                                           | 2025-07-27 16:00:56 |
| 72xdo5xdpb | 161 | Pantalón pirata                                                             | 2025-07-27 16:00:38 |
| pyryksiwjb | 161 | Escritura y comienzos                                                       | 2025-07-24 14:51:11 |
| v7pz7ugglz | 111 | ¿Qué opciones nos quedan?                                                   | 2025-07-24 00:45:36 |
+------------+-----+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------+

So there are posts to fetch! But I don’t know why they aren’t…

8

Do you see any other [READ] messages in your logs? Otherwise, does it work if you restart the WriteFreely application?

9

No, this is the only “READ” message i get in the logs (syslog, btw).

No, I have restarted both the service and the server with no improvement (nor error message at the service restart).

10

Hmm, are errors getting logged to a different place? If so, there might be something helpful in there.

11

I didn’t see any other relevant log, neither in /var/log/ or the writefreely directory. Is there any configuration element to specify where to log?

12

Hi!

After updating the server’s SO, it seems that the error is gone and the public feed is populated again.

Thanks for the interest!