Help! RSS links no longer work

I have forwarded your question.

Thanks Laura (my namesake)

Thanks for noting the issue! We made a technical change to the site yesterday for security purposes, and Yahoo's feed reader won't accept RSS feeds unless they are compliant with the old settings. Unfortunately, this isn't something we can change, but I would highly recommend using a free reader such as Feedly (www.feedly.com) to access our RSS feeds. Sorry for any inconvenience!

You can just put this site on your bookmarks bar and then click on it whenever you want to come to the site. That is what I have done.

thanks for tips. But I really miss just having the feed(s) on my home page!

Hi Laura et. al. Feedly doesn't work. At least not with Chrome. Any other ideas from the tech people?

I'd try clearing the cookies and cache on your computer and then try again.

Actually, not sure Feedly works with anything anymore. Seems to be down.

Very frustrating!

Hi,
I'd like to give some more information about this as some may find it useful as to how they can proceed. This does get a bit technical, but I'll do my best to explain what that means to you as I go so that the layman can follow.

First, why did we make a change? Any website that has a store or otherwise processes transactions needs to be in compliance with something called PCI. In essence, if you want to the banks to process transactions, you have to be in compliance with the security standards they set. As all of our tours and many of our guidebooks, etc are sold through our website, this is a big deal for us to ensure that we are compliant. Thus, any time a user makes a secure connection with a website (the "s" in https) like ours, a particular protocol must be used to ensure up-to-date security between our servers and you.

It used to be that websites used SSL (secure socket layer) to make a secure connection. However, that protocol has now been widely hacked. Something called TLS (transport layer security) is the successor. However, TLS 1.0 which is what has been widely supported since the previous millenium (a long time in tech years) has been hacked and is now considered to be insecure. TLS 1.1 and the latest TLS 1.2 are the new standards.

As required by the banks with what was originally a June 30, 2016 deadline (there has been an extension to this date, but we are pressed not to delay if we don't have to), we are required to drop support for TLS 1.0. This means that our servers will not make a secure connection with systems that haven't been updated to use TLS 1.1 and 1.2.

In other words, all the feed readers out there that no longer seem to be able to read our forum feeds, they require an insecure connection that we can't support anymore (yes, even web/tech giant Yahoo). What's the solution? In technical terms, you need to find a feed reader that supports TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.2. If you love one particular feed reader, maybe send them an email to ask for support of TLS 1.2. Or, if you're willing to look at using a different feed reader, look for the most modern/well-updated app you can find. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find one in my own brief search, but I'm sure there are some out there.

Thanks for bearing with me with this lengthy explanation. My apologies that we can't support these older, flawed security protocols, but hopefully it's clear why we've made this change.

If anyone finds a feed reader that works with our forum feeds, please share them here!!

I just received a report that Feedly seems to be working well. I understand this is not in line with a previous reply here, but it may be worth trying out for yourself to see if it works for you.

I just tested the Feedly app on iOS and that also seems to receive our forum feeds just fine. I'm not endorsing the app as I've barely used it, but it may be worth trying out.