CUNY Academic Commons

It appears that requests from the Commons to the gethandshake.com URLs (like https://huntercuny.joinhandshake.com/external_feeds/22199/public.rss?token=mvGP52tz9dcrPlLLUOuKd3sAMAV-viV-qWZfG0AxEWU7n2I033VoNg) are returning a 403 Forbidden error. This suggests to me that gethandshake.com has blacklisted or otherwise blocked the Commons. There's many different reasons why this might happen, but generally it's due to too many requests taking place.

I'd recommend that Jane, or whoever's responsible for talking to the folks at gethandshake.com, to file a ticket asking whether they can get more information about why requests from *.commons.gc.cuny.edu (15.204.146.102) are being blocked.

Jane replies:

Here is the response I received from Handshake. Could you please let me know what our next steps could be:

I can confirm that we don’t restrict access to schools based on IP addresses, and there would be no way on our end to unblock anything. That said, it’s possible that our IPs may need to be unblocked on your side. You can find the full list of our IP addresses in the Email Delivery: Unblocking Handshake Email.

Looking at the errors in your screenshot, it seems these are the feeds involved:
Clinical Care Events
https://huntercuny.joinhandshake.com/external_feeds/22199/public.rss?token=mvGP52tz9dcrPlLLUOuKd3sAMAV-viV-qWZfG0AxEWU7n2I033VoNg
Career Fairs
https://huntercuny.joinhandshake.com/external_feeds/22507/public.rss?token=MD0AU-Va2RFGPaK7vErVPpUCvgzzZQHAPJtcT20qwQwt7O_p6IT90A

It looks like the Career Fairs feed currently doesn’t have any active results, which might explain why it’s not displaying as expected.
As for the Clinical Care Events feed, I didn’t encounter any errors when opening it in a browser. It seems the issue might be specific to how the feed is being processed in your RSS widget. One thing to check: I noticed there are emojis in the description of the second event in the feed results, titled “Exploring Through Play – Nurturing Growth and Healing in Children.” Do you happen to know if your RSS widget supports emojis? That could potentially be causing issues.

Let us know what you find, or if we can help dig into this further!

It's good that the Handshake folks responded so quickly, but I'm afraid that their diagnosis isn't quite right. We are getting 403 errors, indicating that our requests are being flagged as "forbidden". This is almost certainly happening on their end, probably in their web-application firewall or perhaps in their server security rules. Specifically, I'm also able to access the feed URLs from a personal machine/IP, but when I run the same commands from the WordPress production site, the requests are rejected:

$ ifconfig | grep 15.204
        inet 15.204.146.102  netmask 255.255.255.255  broadcast 15.204.146.102  destination 15.204.146.102

$ wget https://huntercuny.joinhandshake.com/external_feeds/22199/public.rss?token=mvGP52tz9dcrPlLLUOuKd3sAMAV-viV-qWZfG0AxEWU7n2I033VoNg
--2025-04-28 21:47:59--  https://huntercuny.joinhandshake.com/external_feeds/22199/public.rss?token=mvGP52tz9dcrPlLLUOuKd3sAMAV-viV-qWZfG0AxEWU7n2I033VoNg
Resolving huntercuny.joinhandshake.com (huntercuny.joinhandshake.com)... 34.160.45.135
Connecting to huntercuny.joinhandshake.com (huntercuny.joinhandshake.com)|34.160.45.135|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2025-04-28 21:47:59 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

This shows that the connection is completing, but the server is rejecting the request.