A client reported in that their homepage newsfeed which was being fed from the RSS feed that comes with the Blog on SharePoint Online, was missing it’s content. Despite there being blog posts, the RSS feed was rendering just the header section with no article content.

The reason this occurs is because feed items will expire after a certain period of time, 7 days by default. To change this,  follow these steps:

1.      Navigate to the blog post list your RSS feed is reading from. e.g. https://<mySharePointSite.com>/Lists/Posts/AllPosts.aspx

2.      From the ‘List’ ribbon, select ‘List Settings.’

3.      Select ‘RSS Feed.’

4.      At the bottom of the page, adjust the thresholds. The upper limits are 1,000 items and 9,999 days old.

Note that there’s a bit of a caching mechanism in place – I had to wait 20 minutes or so to see the posts return to the RSS feed.

Personally I think 7 days is a very low threshold for this kind of thing and is bound to create similar confusion as to what we experienced. No doubt it made a lot of sense when crunching numbers to design a scalable global Cloud architecture, but if we want to get more small business & mom & pop users on O365 it’ll be good not to put in too many abstract default limits. Hopefully Microsoft will take note and crank this up to something more standard like 30 or 90 days!