RSS block crashing my moodle course?

Sure seems like it.  I have a customer who has a course that periodically crashes with the warm fuzzy message of - well nothing actually.  No error reported in the moodle error log file.

The crashing moodle instance is 2.6.

The course tried to load and then reports the following message

Connection Interrupted
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.

I restored the course for my customer yesterday.  He emailed me again this am and said the course crashed again.  The last thing he did was add the RSS block to the course.

So, I check it out, created a new course and activated the RSS News feed block.  Turning the block on did not crash the course BUT, when I specified to actually link to an RSS feed, specifically the top Stories - Google News feed.....and click Save changes....

BOOM - out go the lights.

Once That error occurred, there was nothing I could do to get the course to load again.  Its like the black widow, once it bites you, its over.

After a bit more testing, I was able to isolate the problem to the Top Stories Google News feed.  The CNN.com World news feed configured fine.

CNN.com feed works fine...








I did find this post about Google shutting down its RSS service.

It seems this version of moodle missed it, which is an honest oversight, but for the entire course to time out because of a feeder that is no longer there is terrible.

Delete the Google feed option by clicking on the add/edit feeds link in the main form and then killing the Google feed option by clicking on the X.

Moral of the story? 

If you use remote RSS, fine.  Just be sure NOT to use the Google feed.  You can edit