This could be because the order of changelog entries is different in the RSS Feed than it is when viewing the changelog page.
As an example, the first entry for Feb 15 is “Sales of new server apps will end today, Feb 15, 2023” on the feed while it is “Marketplace Reporting Deprecation Notice: v1 APIs” on the page (which we didn’t get notified about). Slack probably only checks if the first <item> has changed and doesn’t send updates if there are no new items on top of the RSS Feed.
Please make sure the order is the same in the RSS Feed and any new items are sorted to the top of the feed, so we can rely on the feed instead of having to check the page manually every day. Thanks!
Thanks for reporting this. I’ve created an internal ticket to looking into what’s going on. One of our team members will get back to you with the results.
The different ordering for the RSS feeds is intentional, and you were spot on in guessing the reason. Slack only looks for any new items at the top of the feed.
In the changelog page itself, we order under the same date by the type of changelog entry. But in the RSS feed, we always put the newest items at the top to ensure (the more naive) feed readers don’t miss any items.
However, given that with the current behaviour, you are still missing items, we will have to investigate further as to what Slack is doing and why items are still not appearing.
Based on the changelog items added on March 17, and what I see in the Slack RSS app, I’m confident in calling this issue fixed. @BenRomberg and others, please let me know if you continue seeing issues.
Also, for some entries, the dates vary quite a bit. This one has March 17 as its date on the changelog page, but was posted on March 20 on Slack: https://developer.atlassian.com/changelog/#CHANGE-910 - not a blocker though, maybe it was published at a different date or it’s due to how Slack is checking for changes.
Thanks for your efforts, it has clearly improved already!
Hey @mventnor, we have observed the Slack RSS Feed for some time now and have consistently missed some updates in our Slack channels, some of them critical. Within the last week alone, we had at least these:
Note that we’re watching all changes, without any filters, from https://developer.atlassian.com/changelog/ and the feed URL used doesn’t have any parameters (ends with ?). It looks like some changes are included when using the components filter, as e.g. CHANGE-1181 is visible in the #marketplace-changelog channel on the TPM Slack.
If you could please investigate once again, especially since the Slack compatibility is highlighted on top of the changelog page. If this cannot be fixed, we need to try again with another RSS Feed solution, but would really like to stay with the Slack integration. Reading and double-checking all changelog entries twice is really not a solution with the vast quantity of changelog entries nowadays.
@BenRomberg The issue still seems to be the different way Slack interprets “new” items in feeds compared with other feed readers. While we’ve added a few workarounds in our system for Slack, there are still some items that get missed.
Slack is definitely an important RSS reader, so we have a task in our backlog to fix this by changing what the pubDate of each entry is. Our team has a lot of tasks but I’ll share more when I can.
@mventnor it looks like there is some kind of backfill going on with those changelog entries. It seems that there were 2 entries being added retroactively today, which neither the Slack integration nor any “normal” user visiting the changelog page would be able to detect:
The changelog items detected here today (by RSS Reader app “Feedly” on Android) have a published date of October 12 and September 26.
If I’m not mistaken, this would make it very hard for human readers of the changelog to find these retroactively added changelogs. Why don’t the changelog entries show the actual date when they were added? Might this also be the reason why Slack has difficulties sending notifications for all entries?
When we first designed changelogs we wanted to give Atlassians control over what date their entries were under. One of the reasons was the ability to add retroactive entries, which was especially useful when migrating from the old changelogs to the current system.
I’ll definitely look into these entries and see if they were meant to have retroactive dates. With developer changelogs becoming more mature and widely used, we need to see if anything in our changelog process needs revisiting.
We are currently rolling out a new and more fundamental fix that I described here . This change needs to be coordinated across multiple services, so for the next day or two, you may even see an increase in the number of missed items in Slack. We’re sorry about this, but once the changes are fully in production, there should never be a missed item in Slack again.
@mventnor thank you so much for following up on this! Better to have a temporary malfunction and a permanent fix in a few days than to miss any important update in the (hopefully long and prosperous) future
I’m seeing the latest Bitbucket Data Center announcement using this fix, so every future entry should show up in Slack. Please let us know if you notice missing entries happen again.
