I don’t know why this happened. I did not request any refund, but woke up to an email called “Your refund from NewsBlur”. My premium archive account was annually renewed almost a month ago, and my attempts today to restore it (by paying again) leave me forever stuck at the landing page at Login
I hope that when this problem is resolved, I still have access to all my history of saved/unread stories!!
Sorry! You were one of the few folks who had to get downgraded because your account was wreaking havoc due to all the feeds in your account. I upgraded you back to premium but I can’t have you on the premium archive tier.
If you want the full Premium Archive experience, I highly recommend running your own local NewsBlur instance on your machine (or a machine you control in the cloud). It’s easy to do: GitHub - samuelclay/NewsBlur: NewsBlur is a personal news reader that brings people together to talk about the world. A new sound of an old instrument.
You deleted years’ worth of my information that I was saving on my account, without warning me first??
I would gladly remove the majority of those feeds if I knew it was causing that much of a problem. Give me a chance here. Now I can’t even log in or do anything because the data is all messed up.
Ok, I managed to log in again. I’m now going to delete a bunch of these feeds in the hopes you’ll reconsider. I really had no idea I was wreaking havoc and I’m sorry about that. I wish you had communicated more with me about it.
Part of the problem for me is that there is a multi-step process for deleting a feed which tends to go slowly: first I have to switch to the “unread” feed view to identify feeds with too many unread. Then I have to switch to saved view to see if I have any saved stories, which also means loading the saved count for every other feeds and takes the browser a minute. Then I delete the feed. Then repeat. A lot of unnecessary data goes back and forth each time.
Another issue is that I only realized very recently that the unread counts displayed were false - something I meant to bring up but hadn’t yet. When there are more than 200 or 500 unread (varies per feed) the number does not increase beyond that limit. So a feed could have thousands of unread articles and it only tells me 500. Thus the total unread count at the top never increased after upgrade to premium archive last year. Another reason I didn’t consider just how much of a burden I was being. Very sorry.
Ok, I have now removed all of the most obviously “churny” feeds from my account, and it’s reduced my global unread count by ~40%.
Is there any way you could help me identify remaining feeds which may still be problematic for the servers? It’s not clear to me at this point what heuristics I could or should be using in order to get back in good standing for premium archive.
I’m not sure how helpful I can be, but I would love if we could develop some objective/quantitative measure for what feeds are problematic, so that they can be blocked in software, to prevent future users like me from accidentally and unintentionally overwhelming your servers. While I accept that in the short term you need to protect the majority of your users, and banning me was a reasonable first step, I hope that in the long run we can find a better system than simply blaming the user for using it wrong.
I think you’re fine, you’re back to premium and you no longer need to remove any more feeds. Honestly, it wasn’t even your account that triggered the slowdowns, it’s just that your account had the second higher number of feeds. No need to take any other measures and thanks for being so proactive!
Thank you so much, Samuel!! Your response really means a lot to me. I was feeling a bit ashamed from having been kicked off.
Ideally you wouldn’t need to keep track of so many unreads, regardless of premium archive, because I would actually read all my feeds in a timely manner. But we know how life goes. I needed this prompt to be less ambitious and more realistic about what I have time to read. 