RSS Module – 403 Forbidden Error When Retrieving Feed (Works Fine in Zapier)

Questions
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1

Hey everyone :waving_hand:

I’m trying to set up a simple scenario using the RSS module to watch new RSS feed items.
I’ve also tested with the Retrieve RSS feed items module, but I keep running into this error on test runs:

RuntimeError: 403 Forbidden

Here’s the feed I’m using:
:backhand_index_pointing_right: https://www.newswire.com/newsroom/rss/business-business-news

A few details:

  • The URL is correct and working.

make.com RSS 403 Error
make.com RSS 403 Error1538×1247 141 KB

I tested the same feed in Zapier, and it worked perfectly there.

  • So it seems the issue is likely on Make’s end (possibly related to user-agent headers or IP restrictions).

  • Error happens both when using “Watch RSS feed items” and “Retrieve RSS feed items.”

Screenshot of the error for reference: (attached)

Has anyone else run into this with similar feeds? Or does anyone know a workaround (e.g., custom headers, proxy, etc.)?
Would love any tips or if the Make team could take a look.

Thanks in advance :folded_hands:

4

Welcome to the Make community!

I’m able to repro the issue. This means that somehow Newswire is blocking Make.

image
image927×647 59.1 KB

Upon further investigation, this is due to Newswire incorrectly configuring a Cloudflare proxy, to prevent automated systems from accessing their entire site. Please contact the Newswire webmaster to remedy the issue, providing the below links to them.

For more information, see:

Hope this helps! If you are still having trouble, please provide more details.

— @samliew
P.S.: investing some effort into the tutorials in the Make Academy will save you lots of time and frustration using Make!

5

Here’s a workaround.

Similarly to web scraping, you can use third-party URL scraping services that specialises in bypassing Cloudflare security proxy, to get the actual content of the web page.

For example, here’s how I successfully managed to fetch the Newswire RSS feed using DumplingAI:
image

Then, you can put that through the XML parser, to get the array of feed items:
image

You can get 20% off Dumpling AI by using this discount code: 20PERCENT

So you basically need to “visit” the site yourself to get the content. This is called Web Scraping.

Web Scraping

For web scraping, a service you can use is ScrapeNinja to get content from the page.

ScrapeNinja allows you to use jQuery-like selectors to extract content from elements by using an extractor function. ScrapeNinja also can run the page in a real web-browser, loading all the content and running the page load scripts so it closely simulates what you see, as opposed to just the raw page HTML fetched from the HTTP module.

If you want an example, take a look at Grab data from page and url - #5 by samliew

AI-powered “easier” method

You can also use AI-powered web scraping tools like Dumpling AI.

This is probably the easiest and quickest way to set-up, because all you need to do is to describe the content that you want, instead of inspecting the element to create selectors, or having to come up with regular expression patterns.

The plus-side of this is that such services combine BOTH fetching and extracting of the data in a single module (saving operations), and doing away with the lengthy setup from the other methods.

More information, other methods

For more information on the different methods of web scraping, see Overview of Different Web Scraping Techniques in Make 🌐

Hope this helps! If you are still having trouble, please provide more details.

— @samliew
P.S.: investing some effort into the tutorials in the Make Academy will save you lots of time and frustration using Make!