A sensible download error message is now displayed if a request for a podcast episode returns 403 (Forbidden).

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Original report from Leila Burrell-Davis at 15:43:40 on 2012-07-20

A daily podcast that I've been subscribed to for some time started failing to download about a week ago: "Error: Unknown error". I've been submitting failure reports for each episode from within Radio Downloader. Most recent report was no. 34686. The podcast URL is http://nathanlowell.com/tommw/feed/. The author has made some recent changes to his server which have included some site hardening but no one else has complained of problems (except one person using wget, which was forbidden as part of the hardening process).

I have followed the steps you outlined in issue #153, i.e.

• Removing the podcast subscription.
• Exiting Radio Downloader
• Clearing the Internet Explorer cache (even if this isn't your normal browser)
• Deleting the file radiodld-httpcache.db from your temp directory
• Opening Radio Downloader again and seeing if this has made any difference.

but it didn't help.

Any suggestions how to track this down? The podcast author is quite technical and seems willing to be helpful but I don't know where to start.

I can download the episodes manually, so it's not the end of the world.

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Imported from Bug 678 in the NerdoftheHerd.com Bugzilla.

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Original comment from Matt Robinson at 17:34:10 on 2012-07-20

The reason the downloads are failing is because the server is returning an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) error in response to the request to download the podcast.

Looks like whoever 'hardened' the website has been a little overenthusiastic - if the requesting user-agent contains the text 'Downloader', this causes a 403 to be returned:

"Radio Downloader 0.24.2.0" (our normal user-agent) => 403 Forbidden "Radio Dld 0.24.2.0" => 200 OK "Downloader" => 403 Forbidden

If you'd like to contact the podcast author with the above info (or send them a link to this bug), hopefully they will be able to tweak their rules to allow Radio Downloader to access their podcasts.

However, Radio Downloader should handle this case better by giving you an error message explaining that a 403 (Forbidden) was returned by the remote server rather than just giving an unknown error.

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Original comment from Leila Burrell-Davis at 16:42:57 on 2012-07-23

Many thanks for the speedy diagnostic info. I have forwarded this to the podcast author for action (I hope).

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Original comment from Matt Robinson at 19:57:07 on 2012-09-10

Added correct handling of this case in dae8b05 by throwing DownloadException of type RemoteProblem with the following message:

{hostname} returned a status 403 (Forbidden) in response to the request for this episode. You may need to contact the podcast publisher if this problem persists.