On several of my higher volume feeds, the number of items showing up again has increased over the last couple weeks. I realize that this is often caused by the feed mismanaging its own dates and guids, but what I am talking about is new behavior on old feeds that have worked for a long time.
What prompted this note was it just now happened for the first time on Karl Denninger’s Market Ticker feed. Now, if you know anything about Karl, you know that he is super-scrupulous about getting his tech right. It seems doubtful that his feed is messed up.http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?rss…
Did Newsblur tweak it’s algorithm recently so that previously read stuff might reappear? The symptom tends to be that, once a real new item shows up, it will bring with it N already read items. Perhaps it likes the companionship.
The feed where I first noticed this behavior is this one: http://westernrifleshooters.wordpress…
and I just assumed they had their metadata screwed up. But now that other feeds are showing the same behavior, I am not so sure.
So NewsBlur only stores read story status for stories that are currently in the story database. Once the story drops out due to the feed being trimmed, then read stories for that feed drop out as well. That’s the only time read stories get pruned.
I am hearing of a few reports of this behavior, but it’s rare and seems to only effect certain feeds. Can you provide as many details as you can? How many stories per day/week does this feed contain? Do you read them all? Only when the unread count is 0 do read stories creep back in as unread, or do they unread themselves even with a positive unread count?
I found this in a fresh session just now. There were a total of 40+/- items across a bunch of feeds. That feed had 5 items, only 1 of which I had not seen before.
As an aside: I wonder if this issue might be related to my reading habits. I regularly use at least three different computers (with the web app) and occasionally use a fourth instance on the iPad. Errors in coordinating the previously read list across those sessions could lead to this problem, although I have not actually seen it happen when moving from machine to machine. Typical behavior … finish a session in the study on one machine with zero unread … walk downstairs and open a session in the living room … the session will often open with a list of unread items and then spontaneously correct itself to reflect the previous session I just closed on the other computer. I try to avoid have more than one Newsblur session open at a time, but it still happens.