Feed Showing Wrong Episodes

“Wrong episodes” covers several different problems: missing episodes a subscriber should have, episodes appearing that they shouldn’t, or an episode not appearing when you expect it to after publishing. Work through the relevant section below.

Episode Not Appearing After Publishing

Check availability dates. Benecaster controls when each episode appears in each tier’s feed through availability dates — not just the WordPress publish date. An episode can be published in WordPress but not yet available in the feed if its availability date hasn’t passed.

Go to the episode editor and check the Access tab. Confirm the availability date for the subscriber’s tier has passed. If it hasn’t, the episode won’t appear in the feed yet — this is expected behaviour for scheduled early access or timed releases.

Check the availability cron. Benecaster checks for passed availability dates every 15 minutes via a scheduled background task. If your site runs on a shared host with low traffic, the scheduled task may not fire on time. An episode whose availability date just passed may take up to 15 minutes to appear in the feed.

To force an immediate check, go to Benecaster → Tools and click Check Availability Now.

Flush the feed cache. After an availability date passes and the cron runs, the feed cache for affected tiers is cleared automatically. If you suspect the cache is stale, flush it manually from Benecaster → Tools → Flush Feed Cache.

Check that the episode is published. Draft or scheduled WordPress posts are not included in any feed regardless of availability settings.

Episode Appearing for Wrong Tier

Check tier mapping. Go to Benecaster → Settings → Subscription and review your tier map. Confirm each membership tier is mapped to the correct Benecaster tier. A misconfigured tier map is the most common cause of a subscriber seeing episodes they shouldn’t — or not seeing ones they should.

Check episode-level overrides. Episode availability can be set at the show level (default for all episodes) or overridden per episode. An episode-level override takes precedence over the show default. Open the episode editor, go to the Access tab, and check whether per-episode availability dates are set differently from the show default.

Check the subscriber’s tier. In Benecaster → Subscribers, confirm the subscriber is on the tier you think they’re on. If your membership plugin recently changed their tier, Benecaster reflects that change on the next feed request.

Subscriber Seeing Episodes They Shouldn’t

If a subscriber on a lower tier is receiving episodes that should only be available to a higher tier:

Check the episode’s Access tab — confirm the higher-tier availability dates are set correctly and earlier than the lower-tier dates (or that lower-tier access is set to “hidden” or “teaser only”)
Check the tier mapping — confirm the subscriber’s membership tier maps to the correct Benecaster access level
Flush the feed cache — an old cached feed from before you changed availability settings may still be serving

Subscriber Receiving No Episodes at All

If a subscriber’s feed is completely empty:

Confirm their token is valid and their membership is active — see Subscriber Can’t Access Their Feed
Check that at least one published episode has an availability date in the past for their tier
Confirm their tier is mapped — an unmapped tier generates a valid token but an empty feed

Feed Not Updating in Podcast App

The feed content is correct when tested in a browser but the subscriber’s podcast app isn’t showing new episodes:

Most podcast apps poll their feeds every 1–24 hours. There may simply be a lag. The subscriber can usually trigger a manual refresh by pulling down to refresh their show in the app.
Some apps cache aggressively. Ask the subscriber to remove and re-add the feed if a manual refresh doesn’t work.
Benecaster sends ETag headers with every feed response. Apps that honour ETags will receive a 304 Not Modified response when nothing has changed, which is efficient but can mask problems if the ETag is wrong. Flushing the feed cache from Benecaster → Tools resets the ETag.