Work-around for broken Discussion Forum RSS Feeds

One problem with the DreamHost Discussion Forum is that the RSS feeds are not properly encoded. They are declared as 7-bit ASCII, but often contain non-ASCII characters (accented characters, etc).

This problem makes the feeds unreliable in some RSS readers, such as Safari and Mail on Mac OS X. For example, a subscription to All Posts will fail whenever any post with a stray non-ASCII character appears. I reported this bug to Dreamhost support over a year ago, but nothing has changed.

As a workaround, I've setup a simple CGI script that strips out non-ASCII characters from any Discussion Forum feed, so the feed is always valid XML. Please feel free to use it. The URL is of the form:

http://habilis.net/dream_discuss_rss_fix.cgi?FEEDNAME

For example, the broken feed for all threads is:

http://discussion.dreamhost.com/feeds/all_threads.rss

The fixed feed is:

http://habilis.net/dream_discuss_rss_fix.cgi?all_threads.rss

If you want to run it yourself, the CGI script is just:

#!/bin/bash
echo Content-type: application/xml
echo
curl -s "http://discussion.dreamhost.com/feeds/$QUERY_STRING" | tr -d '\200-\377'

Cheers - Chuck

This might be worth setting up as a dreamhosters site, much like blog.dreamhosters.com used to sorta be around.

-Scott

Sounds like a good idea. However, discussion.dreamhosters.com seems to already be taken (but no pages served).