Wait, if a story in unread in global, is it also unread when you open the feed directly?
Nope.
Which is to say: if I manually mark it as unread in global, it’s also unread in the feed. If it mysteriously appears as a zombie, then no, it’s still read in the feed. I don’t know what happens with stories I simply haven’t read yet.
Another data point: I mentioned earlier that I removed Boing Boing from my subscribed feeds and that didn’t have an effect on the zombie story list. Well, now all the Boing Boing stories are gone from my Global Shared / Unread list.
More specifically, it seems like when you read through all the zombie stories, they temporarily go away, but then they come back after an hour or two. This time, when they came back, the Boing Boing stories were gone.
I’m going to try re-subscribing to Boing Boing to see if that makes them come back.
Could this be a difference in the ‘trimming’ horizon for old stories being different between Global Shared Stories and subscribed feeds?
This is happening for me for any stories I have previously saved. I’ve unsaved them since, but now they’ve been moved to the permanent “Saved” section of the database where stories can last longer than 30 days. These stories are marked as read and unsaved in any other news stream I have.
The latest story presenting this behaviour is 12 days old and more recent stories are occasionally added to the problem. The oldest is from 13-Dec-2013. NewsBlur runs frightfully slow when downloading much older stories.
The platform and browser seem to make no difference.
Ok, good news, I finally figured out a novel solution to this bug. I just launched it and now any story you mark as read should stay marked as read.
The bug was that stories get culled from the bottom of a feed to make room for newer stories. Those stories, if shared, would be marked as read by you. But when the original story is deleted, the read story information is also deleted (which is why I don’t have any personal statistics on how much you’re reading until I build a new low granularity database table that keeps track of this, which I plan to eventually).
Now stories that are shared are never deleted, so your read status is also preserved. Should work fine for any story you mark as read from now on. Let me know otherwise.
I don’t think your fix is working. I’ve marked all Global Shared Stories as read 3 or 4 times since I saw your posting claiming a fix, and they still keep coming back. As far as I can tell, there has been no change in behavior.
Same here, I’m afraid.
Ditto. I manually marked everything back to the earliest globally-shared story I have (still from 12/11/2013), and an hour or two later, they were all back.
By the way, I mentioned earlier that when I unsubscribed from Boing Boing, the bogus shared stories from that feed disappeared. When I resubscribed, they all came back.
Why are stories from feeds I subscribe to showing up in Globally Shared, anyway? Shouldn’t those automatically be filtered out?
P.S. Sam, thanks for continuing to look into this. I know that on the grand scale of things this is pretty minor…hopefully investigating this will end up in some other bug fixes or performance improvements that will make it worthwhile.
Having this problem as well. Any items from feeds I follow personally that are shared by anyone show up in the Global Shared Stories list. If I read them in either place, they get marked as read in both places. The problem is that at the 1-month (roughly) mark, all of them return to my Global Shared Stories list as unread and while it lets me mark them as read, they come back after a few hours.