I’m seeing unread items in NewsBlur change to read after 14 days of sitting in a feed, much as Google Reader would mark them read after 30. Is there a way to turn this behaviour off? I want persistent counts. NewsBlur already has a manual tool to unclutter feeds.
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I also think that this is something we users should be able to determine – how far back we want the unread stories to persist in our feeds. There are some feeds where pruning after two weeks is fine by me, and some I want to be able to read back through no matter how long I let it sit. Ideally, we’d have a global and per-feed setting.
The thing here is just the same as when feeds were switching to other feeds from the same site without warning: it’s disconcerting when things change behind the scenes without warning.
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I need to add: I’m also somewhat upset that when I went back through the feed affected here using “mark as unread” on articles I wanted to read later, those unread marks were thrown out.
I’m happy with 2 weeks being the length of time for unread stories. However, being able to mark stories older than 2 weeks as unread is something I’d love to do. It ain’t easy, and it’s a struggle to make these things happen.
Well, I am glad *you* are happy with it. I guess that’s all that matters.
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I am sorry. I posted in the heat of the moment, which I should have learned years ago never turns out well. I did not mean to be so harsh.
Hah, it’s ok. I realize many folks have an emotional attachment to software that they use often. I’d love to implement everything, but as this is still a part-time project that I only get to dedicate about 2 hours a day (the length of my train commute), I have to be merciless in cutting features so I can actually ship new features and still be active on support requests. If you’re persistent and have a good argument, I can be (and have been) persuaded.
Is there a way this can be extended for paid users?
Last year I went on a 2 week European vacation where it would have sucked to come back and find articles missing.
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Google Reader has it set to 4 weeks. Is that preferred by everybody? It’s more processing work, but not significantly more. I vastly prefer 2 weeks, and that’s why it’s set to 14 days. If it hasn’t been read in 14 days, it probably isn’t getting read. That may change between feeds, but that would complicate the Feed Settings dialog. This is something I’m willing to come back to, but I think it would have to be set per-feed.
I suspect many of us posting in this thread would claim to be “hardcore RSS” readers… I actually do go back and see the majority of the posts.
I was without internet most of last week, and didn’t start checking my reader till last night; and I’m going to have to go through now and make sure I catch the important feeds first before they sunset.
But yeah, I do go back and read them… RSS isn’t “recent news” for me, it’s “my archive of interesting stuff”.
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So would a setting on a per-feed basis be ok? It would never mark a feed’s stories as read, period. It would be possible, although I believe it would be the same amount of work to just make it an arbitrary number (4 weeks), but on a per-feed basis.
A per-feed setting would work well for me… leave it for high-volume feeds where I’m not so married to reading every article, but unset it for some slower feeds where I’m basically saving for a binge on a particular topic. (Kinda like how I listen to the “This American Life” podcast.)
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If reader auto-sunsets after 4 weeks, that’s a new thing; over the last 4 years I’ve used it to keep unread items for months at a time, without ever having them automatically mark as read. I’m glad I was linked to this thread - I really though Blur was just buggy as shit and eating my unready items unintentionally. Now I know 
It would be amazing if this could be a setting - if you do make it per-feed, having a global “turn this on for all feeds” switch would be super helpful.
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A lot has changed in the past 6 months. Using redis as a story unread store, I might have an easier time with this. Unfortunately, allowing unreads to persist for longer than 2 weeks is no longer near the top of my priority list, as NewsBlur is beginning to shift focus to shared stories.
This is a nice-to-have, but it’ll be a while before I can get around to implementing infinite unreads.
While I can see why you are interested in the “shared stories” direction, but I thought I should mention that at least for me, the feature is irrelevant and is not going to be used. I would, however, gladly subscribe to have unread stories limited not by time, but by number, as a premium feature.
Surely the cost imposed on your servers is proportional to the number of stories rather than how far back it goes?..
Spot on: “the 14-day limit actually removes almost all of the benefits of using an RSS reader for certain feeds.”
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My sympathy for your scenario has obviously decayed over time, but this bumps it right back up. Something tells me you should only ask for features that I disagree with when I’m feeling pretty good (successful launch today).
I worry that folks will just set all of their sites to “never stale”, which would put quite a bit of strain on NewsBlur. Hmm, I need to figure out the architecture of this, since the 2 week limit is pretty baked in.
My only thought was a per-site setting with a cap on how many unread stories you could have if you’re using the option. Like, “Mark stories read after [90] days (maximum 300 unread stories).” That’s kind of opaque, though.
Really I’m posting because I wanted to say this: there’s a reason I just haven’t gone off and found another way to read my feeds. Newsblur works wonderfully for me in 95% of cases, and your attention to and enthusiasm for it means that even where it clunks, it’s worth waiting around to see things happen.
I just went premium after about 10 minutes using the site, for a number of reasons.
The two main reasons were:
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Your interface is sexy and usable as hell
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Anticipation of this feature. Google Reader’s 30 day limit was killing me as is. I have 160 sites, with probably 500-700 new articles a day… and I read every single one, eventually, unless my reader spikes them for me, which makes it impossible to tell where I am.
I would also use, as an alternative, a “river of news” view that shows all articles instead of just unread ones. Then I could go to a specific date and pick up from where I left off, regardless of read status. (If such a thing exists already, please let me know… still getting used to NewsBlur!)
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I would love to support the inclusion of read stories in the River of News. It’s not even too difficult to do, but the question is should it show you read stories from all feeds in the folder or only feeds that are currently shown as a result of the All/unread/focus control?
Say you have a folder with 20 feeds, 10 of them have unreads, and 3 of them have green unreads (which will show on focus mode). If you are in the Unread mode, should opening that folder show read stories from those 10 feeds with unreads (and are thus currently the only feeds showing), or should it also pull read stories from the entire set of 20 feeds. Tricky question, but I’m leaning towards ignoring the mode you’re in and just fetching read stories from all feeds, regardless of whether or not the mode you are in shows the site.
Also, this will take a bit of time to do, so it’s on the queue, but won’t be worked on immediately. I plan to make it happen though. If too long goes by and you still want this, chime in and I’ll see if I can get it done then.