What Happens When a Token Is Revoked
When a subscriber’s membership cancels or you manually revoke their access, Benecaster needs to decide what to do with their existing feed URL. By default, it serves your public feed — the subscriber’s podcast app keeps working and they hear your public episodes. You can change this to a strict 403 error per show.
Default Behavior: Graceful Public Feed
When a subscriber’s token is revoked or unrecognized, Benecaster’s default response is to serve your show’s public feed at that URL rather than returning an error. From the subscriber’s perspective:
- Their podcast app continues to work — no broken URL, no error message
- They receive your public episode set — the same content any unsubscribed listener can hear
- There is no prompt to re-subscribe; the transition is silent
This is the recommended mode. It prevents support tickets from confused subscribers whose apps suddenly “stop updating” and avoids a harsh UX cliff at cancellation.
The Per-Show Toggle
You can change this behavior per show at Show Settings → Settings → Feeds → Cancelled subscriber feeds.
| Toggle state | What revoked tokens receive |
|---|---|
| On (default) | Public feed — app keeps working, public episodes only |
| Off | HTTP 403 error — podcast app shows an error or stops updating |
Turn the toggle off if your membership agreement requires a hard cutoff at cancellation, or if your content is governed by contracts that prohibit any post-cancellation access.
How Revoked Requests Appear in the Feed Log
Benecaster logs every feed poll with a token_status field. Revoked token requests appear as token_status: revoked; requests with an unknown token (no matching row in the database) appear as token_status: not_found.
These two statuses are distinct:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
revoked |
A token row exists but its membership has lapsed — a cancelled subscriber is still polling |
not_found |
No token row matches — the URL was never issued by this site, or the token was manually deleted |
revoked polls are a re-engagement signal. A cancelled subscriber whose app is still checking for episodes was recently active and may return. See Feed Request Log Retention → for how to use this data.
What Listeners Experience
Subscribers whose tokens are revoked but who receive the public feed will see no change in their app’s behavior. Their subscription entry shows the same feed URL. Episodes that are gated to paying tiers no longer appear, but any public episodes you have published remain visible.
If your show is fully private (no public episodes), subscribers will see an empty feed rather than an error. That is still less alarming to most listeners than an error state.
See Also
- Revoking Access → — how to manually revoke a subscriber’s access from the admin panel
- What Happens When a Subscriber Cancels → — the cancellation flow from the subscriber’s perspective
- How Feed Tokens Work → — the underlying dispatch logic