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Statement Regarding RadioSEGA Podcasts

A statement regarding the deletion of Last Call and Club SEGA from podcasting services, and what we have done to prevent this from happening in the future.

On the 22nd of April, we were notified that Last Call was unable to be downloaded on Spotify. After verifying these claims, we found that Last Call had been deleted from the service. When digging deeper into the root cause of why this happened, an email to a temporary account had informed us that the podcast had been deleted from the platform without a reason given. After a few days of back and fourths, we discovered that it was due to a misunderstanding with our temporary podcast provider, although we doubt this was as the result of a manual review and it was more likely automatic. 2 days later, we received another email that Club SEGA had been removed from all services due to the same misunderstanding.  To date, there have been no further incidents.

For the past 2 months, we had been in the process of switching podcast providers from being self-hosted to a major podcasting platform that we shall not name. We had previously had nothing but pleasant experiences with this host until the incidents, and we were happy to continue working alongside them to bring our podcasts to Spotify. We only used them as a host for our most popular shows as well as those regularly updated, but the plan was to switch more and more to them as time went along.

Although we had a number of gripes with the service, they were a convenient way to get our podcasts onto the Spotify platform (which we had previously struggled with) while mitigating a technical issue we had been suffering for a number of months which was prohibiting us from adding new episodes to our RSS feeds (text files which tells all podcast services that we've released new episodes of our shows).

Our amazing Technical Team have been hard at work squashing a number of bugs on the site's frontend and backend but weren't able to fix the issue with our RSS feeds before the Admin Team's deadline which was the 1st of March. If the issue had not been sorted by the 1st, this gave us just under 2 weeks to search for and move to a new temporary provider so we could get the bare minimum of podcasts onto Spotify by the 12th of March (the 10th anniversary of LiVE programming and our agreed go-live date for the service). The plan was always to move back in-house at a later date once we had time to sort out a smooth transition.

The transition didn't go as smoothly as anyone had hoped, with 2 podcasts removed from services and this having been brought to our attention in a public Discord chat, meaning others could see this happen as it went down. What resulted afterwards was what should really be described as a frantic scramble to move everything away from the host before any more damage was done. Whooa21 was successfully able to identify what was stopping us from editing RSS feeds last Friday night which gave us the tools we needed to pack up shop. I've personally spent the last 2 days manually rewriting RSS feeds for the majority of the shows you see on Spotify, which if you've ever wrote an RSS feed for an iTunes formatted podcast (I know I'm reaching out to a really small crowd here), you would know that it is an extremely time consuming process. 8 hours each day on my only 2 days off this week has really done a number on me but it now means that we're free.

The only shows that are still hosted by this provider are The Manic Monday Show and The SEGA Lounge. As both of these shows are maintained and run by KC, it is his decision as to if he wants to move them away from the current provider. All other shows that are maintained by RadioSEGA (this excludes our shows maintained by their owners such as Radio Redux and The Opinion Zone) are no longer at risk.


The future as of now looks bright for RadioSEGA Podcasts, as we have a much greater understanding of how to maintain our RSS feeds and cater them to specific sites. What this means for you is that episode information will be more detailed when downloading a podcast, and we are working on methods of getting actively updated podcasts delivered to you faster. What this means for us is that we're able to use tags to target them to specific audiences with specific interests as well as adding our podcasts to a whole host of new services, which will hopefully bring some new audience members to RadioSEGA. Self-hosting means there is a significantly lower risk of our podcasts getting deleted which will mean we're able to preserve our history a lot better than we would've done had we continued down our previous path.

I can't think of a more appropriate way to end this, so I'd like to say thanks to RapidRun for bringing this to our attention, but most importantly a huge thank you to those of you who regularly download our podcasts! We always thank the live audiences, but I don't think we really take enough time to thank the podcast listeners, so a seriously big thanks to you for helping to keep RadioSEGA moving behind the scenes, you guys rock!

EDIT: Both Club SEGA and Last Call are available once again on all of our usual platforms. As for all other shows, some sites might still be updating their entries. Please remain patient over the next fortnight while everywhere continues to switch back over to the new versions of each podcast.

26th April, 2020 - 21:30 GMT GreenViper8 Article viewed 1558 times 0 Comments

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