Podcast with 80+ episodes suddenly showing zero items (?!)

Question

Hello!
It appears that Dec 26th something happened which caused the episodes to drop from my iTunes page: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/silken-on-sex/id346614694
To troubleshoot the problem, I have done the following:
-checked the site
-verified the media URLs work
-validated the feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/SilkenvoicePodcast) on feedvalidator.org
-added a new podcast episode and pinged the apple server
All to no avail.
Interestingly enough, when I do a search for the podcast by title, I can see one episode from a year ago and it can be played so long as you're not on the podcast page. Weird, eh?
The "Silken on Sex Podcast" normally has 40k-50k downloads a month. It has 4+ stars with 50+ ratings, and has been around for many months. I know some people will probably think "oooh, explicit content, that's why" but that isn't correct. If that were the case, it would have been taken down by iTunes staff -- and besides, there are several podcasts with far more explicit content than mine
I'm at wit's end and I'd love some help.
Warmly yours,
Kayar

Answer 1

There is no obvious explanation for this. The feed itself is OK. However it doesn't contain anything like 80 episodes - in fact there are 20, though 'Pathos, Eros and Aramis' contains no media file (and so will not appear in iTunes').
If you click the 'subscribe' button in the Store page, all 19 functioning episodes appear. However as you say there are none in the Store page.
I can think of only one explanation for this. As you may know, although when on subscribing the iTunes application reads the feed directly (and so is always up to date), the Store caches the feed and visits it periodically to check for updates: so changes can take 1-2 days to appear (recently it's often been longer).
If, for example, you had been tampering with the feed and had removed all the episodes, restoring them (or some of them) later, and the Store happened to check it while it was empty, you would get the result you have now, and it would self-correct eventually. (Though it seems unlikely you would empty the feed and then reupload it). There may have been some sort of glitch which caused a similar effect.
All I can suggest is that you wait for a few days. As subscribing works OK, it's possible the Store will update again and show the 19 episodes. There have occasionally been cases where something in the feed causes it to work for subscribers but not on the Store, but I can't see anything problematic in the feed (obviously I can't read through every word). However if that had been the case I would have expected older episodes to show, just not more recent ones. The complete disappearance of episodes is unusual, to say the least.
I should give it a few days. If it doesn't sort itself out you could try iTunes Support, but I have to say you are unlikely to get a helpful response (you will probably be sent a form answer telling you how to make a feed). Or you could try asking Feedburner Support whether they have any ideas.
To contact iTunes Support go to http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/ - click on 'Other iTunes Store Features' in the list and then on 'Podcasts'. You will see a link to 'Express Lane', which will guide you eventually to some contact options.