iCal errors with "Error while refreshing"

I'm getting this problem too. Any resolution or work around?

I was having this same problem. It appears that I was using an old url that may have been shut off.

The address I had been using was webcal://iwantsandy.com/everything.ics. I deleted that subscription from iCal and added a new one using the address webcal://iwantsandy.com/list.ics and it is now working.

(The address listed on the site now, webcal://www.iwantsandy.com/?format=ics, just gave me an error. The one I'm using I found in a post here. Somebody should fix that.)

This problem is still happening in 10.5.1, and it definitely seems to have to do with the "@" in the username. iCal will download the ics once on calendar creation, but subsequently tries to encode the username into the URL of the subscription, making it webcal://user%40domain.com@iwantsandy.com/list.ics, and at this point it fails to authenticate and produces the errors describe above.

The (ridiculous) workaround I am now trying is to subscribe to the Sandy feed in Gcal and then export a share from there to subscribe in iCal.

Lame.

Scratch that, as mentioned elsewhere on here, Google Calendar can't subscribe to authenticated feeds.

Hi everyone,

I just tried it on my new-ish Leopard install and it subscribed successfully, but got an error after the first time I hit "Refresh". I clicked the little exclamation point next to the calendar and it said that the login and/or password had been rejected and asked me to authenticate again. After that, it's been working fine.

I think the problem may have something to do with the way iCal adds the username and password to the Keychain the first time. It seems to work every time now that the login details are saved in the Keychain.

How does this compare to what you guys have been experiencing?

Marshall
Sandy's Helpers

Hadn't checked back on it until just now, but yes, same here. Once I re-authenticated it appears to be working fine.

Still not working correctly. The ical URL gets changed from this -> 'webcal://iwantsandy.com/list.ics' to this 'webcal://steve' after I enter my user name and password. Is there a fix for this yet?

Steve,

We believe it's an iCal 3 (Leopard) bug with password-protected subscriptions. As for the "webcal://steve" issue, that's a separate iCal bug. If you click in the textbox and press the right arrow button, the rest of the URL will appear when you get to the end.

We reported the problem to Apple, but they were already aware of it. Hopefully it'll be fixed in OS X 10.5.2, which is already being seeded to testers and is rumored to be released in January.

--
Marshall

Thank you for getting back to me so quickly. I really like the service and it would be even better once I can really integrate it in to what I already use on my Mac.

-Steve

I'm not getting the same error as you. I'm getting the same error as the original poster, namely "Request encountered an unexpected error on subscribed calendars (code 4)." There is not option to re-enter a username or anything because my calendar subscription doesn't seem to be authentication based, it's just a URL with a long stream of letters and numbers (i.e. http://iwantsandy.com/JSKDSYIUSIUYstr... ).

I have Leopard 10.5.2.

I messed around with this some more and it seems like the problem has to to with the To Do list.

When I subscribe for the first time with attachments, alarms and TODO's not stripped out (all the boxes are unchecked) it seems to work OK except that the TODO doesn't appear in my todo list, only as an all day event.

If I quit and restart iCal then the (code 4) error comes back again. If I delete and re-add Sandy then it seems to work OK except for the TODO's as an all day event.

If I check the "remove TODO's" box and do a refresh, the error goes away and the calendar works OK except that the TODOs are missing.

If I download and import the Calendar then the TODOs import fine and I see them listed in my to do list.

So it seems like my work around choices are 1) Subscribe and don't use TODOs or 2) Download the calendar by hand every day. Neither of these is great.

I'm getting the same exact thing as Tim! There has to be a way to fix this. Sandy is much too awesome to let this go.

I have ical subscriptions that have worked for a long time, and today, all of them still worked except for one. They are all subscriptions to my Yahoo calendars, and like I said, just one of them received the "!" mark after trying to refresh. I click on the "!" mark, and receive the following error:

Error While Refreshing
Request encountered an unexpected error on subscribed calendars (code 4).

Seems to be a new issue since all my cal subscriptions worked before. Also seems pretty random since all my other calendars refreshed just fine.

I hope I can get an answer since this thread seems pretty old, but it's the only info I can find when I google the error! HELP!

Any ideas??

~Very Confused!!