Someone has asked me about their [apparently] having lost their various ratings, after they renumbered their episodes.
I’m not sure if they mean they changed the episode numbers—there’s an itunes field in the RSS feed for episode number… or they mean they changed their episode titles… or their itunes field for titles… it’s complicated when you start looking down into the RSS namespaces and start looking at “itunes:title” etc…
My question is: Anyone have any experience, links or ideas around Apple ratings and episode titles or episode numbers?
I don’t know why that happened, but I have read that Apple doesn’t like it if you put the episode number in the title. Maybe that’s why they removed them.
That was true but I have read that it has changed Mark. Difficult to be sure and to keep up to date. I see some big name podcasts with episode numbers included. Not sure Apple are as insistent about it anymore and most apps don’t seem to pick them up from the RSS feed, so it depends how important it is to you.
I think I heard it on Libsyn that Apple Podcasts app does not automatically display the episode numbers anymore so some people are now adding them for Apple episodes (there is a separate tag). Searching for the source still.
It may be an app update that changes what is displayed where… maybe not. Maybe apple changed the rules about when a rating is displayed? How many ratings do you need to have before they display it? - it is an average.
