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 instead — the app then shows an error or stops updating rather than falling back to public content.

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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.

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Removing a Listener Who Bought Episodes

Remove and the bulk revoke action end all feed access, including episodes the listener bought. That is intended: you use that button to cut one person off. Every automatic ending, by contrast, leaves a buyer’s feed intact. Nothing on the Subscribers screen warns you that a listener bought episodes, and the confirmation does not mention it, so this page is the only warning you get. Removing a listener who paid for episodes is usually a refund conversation.

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The Per-Show Toggle

You can change this behavior per show at Show Settings → Settings → Feeds → Cancelled subscriber feeds.

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.

Turn it off on a subscription-only show. If your public feed is empty or near-empty, the default has nothing to fall back to: a cancelled subscriber’s app keeps polling successfully and receives a feed with nothing in it. That reads as your show having stopped publishing, which is worse for you than an honest error. A 403 says the access ended. See Running a Subscription-Only Show.

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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:

revoked polls are a re-engagement signal. A cancelled subscriber whose app is still checking for episodes was recently active and may return.

Benecaster shows you a count, not a list. Benecaster → Subscribers displays “{N} cancelled subscribers are still checking their feed (last 30 days)” whenever the number is non-zero — a headline, not a browsable list. Seeing who they are still means the Analytics Dashboard add-on or a direct database query: Benecaster deliberately shows the count only. The Analytics Dashboard add-on does not show individual subscribers either today — it breaks the log down by show and date, not by person; a per-person view is only planned on its roadmap. The count is hidden entirely when the feed request log is switched off. See Feed Request Log Retention → for what the log stores and how long it is kept.

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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 receive an empty feed rather than an error — which is why the toggle is worth turning off on that kind of show, as above.

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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