Wait Wait I Built This

May 1, 2019 7:18 AM

Last night I saw a notification that there were 50 new episodes of “NPR’s: How I Built This". I thought that it was odd because I don't subscribe to that podcast.

I clicked on the notification and it took me to a page that showed episodes for How I Built This, mixed with two episodes of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me that were already downloaded to my phone. I watched as my phone downloaded fifty episodes of HIBT. Now WWDTM doesn't exist on my phone anymore.

If I go to the Podcasts app and search for WWDTM it doesn’t show up. However if I search for NPR Podcasts I see that WWDTM is in there, and I am subscribed to it.

What the hell is going on? I can't find anything on the intertubes about this happening to anyone else and this doesn't seem to have affected anyone else in my friend circle.

I am running iOS 12.2.

I understand that header data on a single podcast episode could get wonky and make it assign to a different podcast folder...but an entire stream getting renamed and then toasting the subscription to the original podcast...I'm very confused.

posted by aloiv2 to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

I had something similar happen with TED Radio Hour, which is definitely not something I would subscribe to. I think I saw something on Twitter yesterday about NPR having a glitch with their podcasts. It looks like NPR messed something up and then fixed it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:24 AM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: NPR posted about this: "UPDATE: Earlier today, we made a change to our web server caching configuration that resulted in the same RSS feed being served for all NPR RSS URLs. This caused podcast apps to act as if all of our podcasts had changed their titles and added hundreds of new episodes."
posted by This_Will_Be_Good at 7:24 AM on May 1, 2019 [4 favorites]

Best answer: NPR is having some podcast feed issues. The root issue is fixed but they say it could take some time (up to 32 more hours from the time of this comment) to fully resolve.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:25 AM on May 1, 2019

I had something similar happen with Planet Money (which I do subscribe to) and Fresh Air (which I don't, but I've listened to one-off episodes).
posted by madcaptenor at 7:25 AM on May 1, 2019

Response by poster: Y'all are awesome. I am such a Twitter luddite I didn't even realize there was an NPRHelp handle.
posted by aloiv2 at 7:27 AM on May 1, 2019

I didn't even realize there was an NPRHelp handle.

I didn't either! I figured this issue wasn't just my phone, so I pulled up Twitter to see if anyone else was talking about it - I don't use Twitter a lot but it's a nice place to track down real-ish time discussion. I starting typing "npr" in the search box and the autosuggest came up with "npr podcast" which seemed timely. Going with that search term pulled up the NPRHelp account.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:30 AM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting this as I noticed I suddenly have Story Corps which I also would never download because I need to moderate my time spent sobbing in the car.
posted by amanda at 7:32 AM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]

Amazingly beyond twitter they had a human responding to emails about this as well :)
posted by kbuxton at 8:40 AM on May 1, 2019

I had the same thing happen; my phone filled up with How I Built This, I deleted those, it downloaded more, then I unsubscribed. I'll switch it back on this weekend.
posted by Pronoiac at 9:16 AM on May 1, 2019

I had this happen too - all my Ask Me Another podcasts turned into TED Radio Hour podcasts, but only the names had changed (all the podcasts were still there, just wrong title.) Good to know what happened.
posted by 41swans at 5:25 PM on May 1, 2019