All feeds default to Feed view, regardless of view setting

I prefer to read almost all feeds in the Original view, and have only set a few (that don’t work so well with the Original view) to be displayed in the Feed view in per-site settings. However, recently all my feeds have reverted to being displayed in the Feed view (or, more precisely, the “Original→Feed” mode: http://i.imgur.com/NAdTp.png)), regardless of my preference. The per-site settings for these feeds do indicate that they are set to the Original view, and I have the Original view selected as the default in the site preferences as well.

My understanding is that the “Original→Feed” mode is supposed to get triggered to switch feeds with stories that don’t work well with the Original view (those that don’t have titles, or body text) to Feed view. The current situation is that it’s triggered for every feed I have set to Original, including those that worked well before, and continue to work well when I manually switch them to Original (which is almost all of them).

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I just made a pretty major change that switches from Original View to Feed view automatically for broken sites. Did this just start happening as of 5pm PT yesterday?

No, definitely not; it’s been the case for about two weeks at least.

What’s your browser/OS? Oh dear lord, please tell me IE7 running on Mac OS 9 or something.

Firefox 12, on Linux and OS X.

OK, it’s because you have “auto-open first unread story” turned on. Because it is selecting the first unread story as soon as you open the feed, the Original view hasn’t loaded yet. See the issue? If you start selecting other stories, you’ll switch to the Original view if they can be found on the Original.

I don’t really see a way around this, except possibly waiting until the Original is fully loaded and THEN try to find the oldest unread story. But that’s worse than the problem.

Indeed, switching to “Show all stories” seems to fix what I think is the main issue, though I still have intermittent issues with the Original view that I surmise shouldn’t occur, but have yet to pin down.

If waiting for Original to load will make things worse (I’m not sure I understand why), do you think the default should be “Show all stories”, since the Original view is a very prominent feature? (Or… is it already?)

It is already. The issue is around trying to open the first unread story before the Original view is loaded. Because there story has yet to show up on the Original view, you’re switched over to the Feed view.

Good to know; that behavior would have been disastrous as a default, but it still feels broken as a non-default. It may have to do with my mental model of how things work, but I do feel that there at least has to be an explanation/warning if Original cannot work as expected at all under a certain mode.

Could you expand a bit more technically on what you mean by “show up on the Original view”? Why exactly may a story that’s loaded on the Feed view at a given time not be ready on the Original view? Do you cache Original less frequently, or load it on demand?

(By the way, selecting other stories in “auto-open first unread story” mode does not seem to be switching automatically to original, but to the Original→Feed mode; only upon manually selecting Original do stories start to load in the Original view.)

I just launched that explanation of disabled Original/Story view. Refresh to see it. :slight_smile:

When you load a site, two requests are made: one to load the Feed view and one to load the Original view. Either one of those requests may finish before the other. That’s why the Feed view could load before the Original view, exposing the story titles, but not being able to find them in a not-yet-loaded Original view. It takes a few seconds sometimes.

I seem to be missing it. I could use a hint.

A race condition, then. You’re right; the delay to be caused by waiting Original to load would feel broken as well.

“Software is hard” illustrated once again.