Subscriber Can’t Access Their Feed

Work through these steps in order — most feed access problems are resolved by step 3.

1. Confirm the Feed URL Is Correct

Ask the subscriber to share exactly what URL they have in their podcast app. Common issues:

• The URL was truncated. Feed URLs are long. If the subscriber copied their URL from an email that wrapped the text across multiple lines, they may have missed part of it. Token URLs are 64 characters after ?token= — if their token looks short, it’s been cut off.
• The URL has extra characters. Some email clients add tracking parameters or rewrite links. The URL should end with the token and nothing else.
• The URL picked up a stray space. Highlighting a URL with the mouse very easily grabs a trailing space or newline, and a feed URL with one appended fails to resolve rather than failing visibly — the token no longer matches.
• The subscriber is using the wrong URL. If you have multiple shows or tiers, confirm they have the URL for the correct show.

Send them the URL from the copy button rather than retyping it. Open the subscriber in Benecaster → Subscribers and use the copy control on their feed URL — it copies the exact stored value, so it cannot pick up the whitespace or truncation that copying from an email or a browser address bar can. Ask the subscriber to paste rather than type as well.

The correct URL format is:

https://yoursite.com/podcast-feed/?token=a1b2c3d4e5f6...

Or if you’re using pretty permalinks:

https://yoursite.com/podcast-feed/your-show-slug/?token=a1b2c3d4e5f6...

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2. Check the Subscriber’s Membership Status

Go to Benecaster → Subscribers and find the subscriber. Check:

• Is their membership active? If their subscription has expired or been cancelled in your membership plugin, Benecaster revokes their token and (by default) routes their feed URL to the public feed — their podcast app keeps working but shows only public-tier content. If their feed appears empty, the show may simply have no public episodes. Resolve the membership issue in your membership plugin, then issue a new token. See Subscriber Seeing Public Episodes Instead of Paid Content if this is what you’re seeing.
• Is their tier mapped? If their membership tier isn’t mapped to a Benecaster tier, no feed is generated. Go to Benecaster → Settings → Subscription and confirm their tier is mapped.
• When did they last access the feed? The Last Accessed column shows the last time their podcast app polled the feed. If it shows a time in the past, the URL is probably working — the subscriber may just need to refresh manually in their app.

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3. Check Whether a Token Exists

In Benecaster → Subscribers, if the subscriber doesn’t appear at all, their token was never generated. This usually means the subscription activation event wasn’t received from your membership plugin.

To fix: use the Generate Token action on the subscriber’s record to create one manually, then send them the new feed URL. Also check that your membership plugin’s Benecaster integration is properly connected — go to Benecaster → Settings → Subscription and confirm the bridge is active.

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4. Test the Feed URL Directly

Paste the subscriber’s feed URL into a browser. You should see raw RSS XML. If you see:

• Raw XML with episode data — the feed is working. The problem is on the subscriber’s end (wrong URL in their app, app cache, etc.).
• Empty RSS feed (XML with no items) — the token is valid but no episodes are available to the subscriber’s tier. Check tier mapping and episode availability dates.
• A 404 error — the feed rewrite rule isn’t registered. Flush your WordPress permalinks by visiting Settings → Permalinks and clicking Save Changes.
• A blank page or server error — a PHP error is occurring. Check your WordPress debug log.
• A 410 or 403 error — the feed is deliberately refusing the request. Which one, and why, is in the table below.

Telling the refusals apart

A podcast app reports all of these the same way — the feed is gone, unavailable, or broken. They have different causes and different fixes, and only one of them resolves without anybody touching the subscription. Open the URL in a browser and read the XML comment at the top of the response; that is what distinguishes the two errors that share a visible message.

Check Benecaster → Subscribers first, though. If the listener’s row carries a red Feed locked pill, you have your answer without opening anything — that pill means this listener specifically, and it is only ever the free-tier lock in the third row below. A red pill rules out every other cause in the table.

The two “Invalid or expired feed token” rows are the same message, so the message will not tell you which one you have — the scope will. One broken subscriber is the first row. Every subscriber broken at once, while the public feed still loads fine, is the second. Check Settings → Account before working through any per-subscriber steps; if the licence is the cause, nothing you do to an individual token will help.

The per-show “serve public feed on invalid token” toggle does not apply to the second row, and neither does the token being valid. When the licence has ended, any token-bearing request is refused — a perfectly valid, unrevoked token included. On the cancelled and expired paths nothing revokes tokens at all, so a subscriber whose token checks out fine will still be refused. That is deliberate: the toggle governs subscriber-level failures, and this is a podcaster-level one.

The free-tier lock is the one that is not about this subscriber at all. Nothing is wrong with their membership, their token or their URL — they are simply the listener the cap landed on, and the cap is a combined total of paid and free listeners, so gaining a paying subscriber can lock a free one who did nothing. It reverses on its own. Do not reset their token; a new token is over the cap the same way the old one was.

The Subscribers screen used to point away from this cause. Every flagged listener was labelled “Receiving public feed”, which for a locked listener is the one thing not happening to them — a podcaster investigating a dead feed read that the feed was being served and stopped looking. It now renders two distinct pills: amber Public feed for a demoted paying subscriber, red Feed locked for this case. If you are working from an older screenshot or an older note, trust the pill on the screen.

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5. Ask the Subscriber to Re-add the Feed

If the URL is correct and works in a browser but not in the subscriber’s podcast app:

• Ask them to remove the feed from their app and add it again with the same URL
• Some apps cache a “feed not found” state and won’t retry until the subscription is removed and re-added
• If they’re on Apple Podcasts, restarting the app after re-adding can help

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6. Reset the Token

If the above steps don’t resolve the issue, reset the subscriber’s token. This generates a new feed URL and immediately invalidates the old one. Send the subscriber their new URL.

Important: after a token reset, the subscriber must remove their old feed URL from their podcast app and add the new one. Their episode history in the app is not affected.

See Token Reset for how to reset from the admin or how subscribers can reset themselves.