#23141 economist: article pages now behind a Cloudflare challenge, full-text routes cannot work

Routes

/economist/espresso
/economist/:endpoint
/economist/global-business-review/:language?

Full routes

/economist/espresso
/economist/latest

What is expected?

The route returns the category feed with full article text.

What is actually happening?

HTTP 503, e.g.

FetchError: [GET] "https://www.economist.com/1843/2026/08/21/the-kremlins-crypto-king": 403

economist.com now serves a Cloudflare managed challenge on article pages. The 403 body is the <title>Just a moment...</title> interstitial rather than a plain denial.

This is not specific to one article, and not to /interactive/ URLs. Every article page I tried returns 403, with and without a browser User-Agent, and through the route's own got client including its retries. The route uses Promise.all over the articles, so the error names whichever one rejected first, which makes it look article-specific when it is not.

The feeds themselves are NOT blocked, only the article pages:

FEED     https://www.economist.com/1843/rss.xml         200 (no UA override), 200 (browser UA)
ARTICLE  https://www.economist.com/1843/2026/08/21/...  403 (no UA override), 403 (browser UA)

I think this leaves the route dead rather than broken:

the only thing /economist/:endpoint adds over the publisher's own feed is full article text, plus categories scraped from the article's ld+json. Both come from the article page, and both are now behind the challenge.
the publisher's feed already works in any reader without RSSHub. Each item carries title, link, guid, pubDate and an ~86 character description, with no content:encoded and no category. Presumably it has always been that way, given the paywall.
so making the route fall back to the RSS description would emit a feed equivalent to subscribing to https://www.economist.com/<endpoint>/rss.xml directly. It would stop the 503 without leaving anyone a reason to use the route.

Possibly relevant for the docs either way. The endpoint parameter description points at https://www.economist.com/rss as the place to find valid endpoints, but that URL now redirects to the podcasts page, so it no longer lists endpoints for feeds at all.

I don't know if there's a way to mark a route as obsolete/deprecated or it should just be removed.

For anyone landing here because their feed broke, the publisher's own feeds still work unauthenticated and can be used directly in a reader. The broadest ones:

https://www.economist.com/latest/rss.xml               301 items, spanning 23 sections
https://www.economist.com/printedition/rss.xml          44 items, spanning 17 sections
https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/rss.xml  301 items, the weekly round-up

latest is effectively a whole-site feed and is the closest single replacement for the route. Per-section feeds follow the same https://www.economist.com/<section>/rss.xml pattern; I confirmed at least 39 working endpoints by probing, and that is not exhaustive, since there's no index to work from.

Deployment information

Self-hosted

Deployment information (for self-hosted)

Docker, current master

Additional info

[error]: https://<self-hosted>/economist/1843: "HTTP 503"


Reproduced locally on master (40aca9548e).

This is not a duplicated issue

I have searched existing issues to ensure this bug has not already been reported

economist: article pages now behind a Cloudflare challenge, full-text routes cannot work