Updated Wed 8/31 2:39am EDT

We were able to trace this problem back to FTP uploads (usually of large files). In rare cases, files were getting distributed out to our media nodes before the FTP upload was complete. The problem would eventually fix itself as the file completed and the completed version would then get propogated throughout the network, but the lag time for this to happen was undesirably high (upwards of 20 minutes).

We've taken steps to a) speed up the propogation of files throughout the libsyn media network, and b) not deliver partial uploads, but rather deliver the original file from the main libsyn server instead.

If anyone notices truncated downloads, or hears from their users that a file they downloaded from libsyn was cut off, please let us know right away. We beleive this issue to be resolved, but if there's something we missed, we'll want to fix it immediately.

We are getting occasional reports of file downloads being cut-off. We are working to try and figure out a connection between the incidents of file truncation. Please email support@libsyn.com right away if you are experiencing similar issues.

Thanks to some encouragement from Ray Salinski of iPodderX, a directory of libsyn podcasts are now offered as an OPML feed. This will help to ensure that libsyn podcasts are listed in the iPodder Lemon, iPodderX, iPodder.org, and other directories.

The libsyn directory OPML feed can be found here: http://www.libsyn.com/directory/libsyn.opml

Libsyn users: to be included in this feed login to your account, click the settings tab, and check the box at the bottom of the page "list my podcast in the libsyn directory." Then click "save changes" and you will be ready to rock.

There were some browser compatibility issues with the latest template, "Ku-Blue." The template has been repaired. To apply these changes to your page, login to your libsyn account, click the settings tab, and then click templates. Then scroll down to the Ku-Blue template and click the link "use this template."

Note: You'll need to re-add any customizations you made to the page. Thanks to Paul Wilch for pointing out and fixing the problem.

We discovered a bug last week which was preventing QuickCasts from being created, and was at the same time leaving "phantom" files in some users /quickcast folder. This was resulting in inflated disk-usage reporting and for some, unwarranted "You've exceeded your disk quota" e-mails.

This bug has been fixed, and any files lingering in your /quickcast folder have been removed. Please let us know if you have any problems with the libsyn QuickCast feature (or any other libsyn feature for that matter).

Thanks!

This has been a long requested feature which has finally come to fruition. When a listener posts a comment to your blog page, they are now required to verify that they are a human being by entering a series of numbers that appear in an image above the submit button.

This method is known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). Yeah, it's a mouthful, but it's also a widely-used method for preventing spam like we've been seeing on your blog pages. Post a comment here on the support blog to let us know your thoughts on this.

Thanks to everyone for helping us track down and eliminate the bugs in this system. Here are some of the big ones we fixed this week:

iTunes not accepting RSS feed
There was a problem with some RSS feeds that had special characters (like ampersand: &) in the iTunes keywords field. This has been resolved by removing any punctuation (non alpha-numeric characters) from the keywords.

Media Delivery Failing For Some Files
It was discovered that files with names containing multiple periods in a row (i.e. my.file.is....cool.mp3) were not being delivered. This problem has been resolved.

Multiple Language Support for RSS Feeds
It was pointed out to us that some international character sets get displayed as wacky encodings rather than the characters they're supposed to represent. The fix for this is in the works, and we'll make an announcement when it is complete.