Another vote for mark as unread. I’m doing this awkward favorite-then-read motion right now and it’s awkward.
I’ve gotten around this by just tagging them all as favorite and getting to them later. I decided that I wouldn’t use favorite for anything else other than save-for-later-reading.
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After months of work, tuning, and fixing up, this has finally launched. It works for any story that is from the past 2 weeks. Unfortunately, it’s waaaay more work to make Mark as Unread work beyond 2 weeks, but I think this addresses 99% of cases. If it’s beyond 2 weeks, it wouldn’t be unread anyway, and you can star/save it at that point.
Hope you enjoy. Thanks to all of you for the encouragement and insistence that this gets done. Keep it up and let me know your ideas about other features.
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I have been doing the same as Kazriko Redclaw. It is OK as a stop-gap solution, but it’s not ideal.
Along these same lines I was wondering if we could simply have two ways to mark stories (either two different coloured stars, or perhaps different symbols).
In this way, one could use still mark certain items as a favourite, for future reference, and use the other symbol to mark items to read later.
I think it would be a very helpful improvement until such time as true read later functionality could be developed.
Going to assume that we were writing our comments at the same time. 
Haha, yes! My suggestion was instantly outdated.
Actually, it is still not a bad idea to be able to mark stories to either save or read later, rather than sending them to an external service. However, with the addition of ‘mark as unread’ it’s not really important. Thanks for adding this feature!
Hi, I don’t know if my question should go into a different thread.
Today I added a new feed (a webcomic), and I’m planning to read it all from the beginning.
So, I want to mark everything as unread, and then proceed to read them at my own pace.
It does not seem to be possible, because I didn’t see any “mark all as unread” button?
I suppose this wouldn’t be extremely difficult to implement, but nothing like it exists right now. Is this something that happens often?
The problem with doing this is that most RSS feeds only give you the last 10 or so items, so unless Newsblur had been keeping all of those records going back to when the comic began, you won’t be able to read the entire thing through RSS.
Well basically it happens everytime I add a new feed
But Kazriko is right, if there is no way to navigate all the items of a feed other than the latest, then marking all as read is useless.
Oh wait, there is a “Reading from old to new” thread… Maybe it is possible after all.
Samuel, thanks for your work on this. Are you still considering implementing the “delayed mark as read” feature we discussed previously? Is there something blocking it?
Of course I am. Tons of other stuff to do, and little time to do it in. If only this was a full-time job, we’d be all set.
The trick is figuring out how this works. Does clicking a story title mark as read instantly? (Maybe.) Does hovering your mouse over a story mark as read with a delay? (Yes.) Scrolling? Using arrow keys? All of them?
I’m thinking of just not allowing any instant reading and you have to read a story for a minimum for X seconds (set by the user, but between .5-5 seconds). But I still want to indicate the story you’re on, so that’s gotta get built.
Not overly complicated, but it’ll take a day or two to get right, and I only have so much time. If you write this up as a single get satisfaction idea and folks vote on it, it’ll help get this done sooner.
Good to know, and thanks for your reply. Sure, I’ll try to formalize what I’m thinking of with a rough spec sometime next week, and we can further discuss and refine it there.
Sorry to have slacked off on this, but I’m really satisfied with your current implementation; especially the fact that it works as expected with the original view. There does seem to be one minor bug: I’ve set the timeout to five seconds, but the first story on every feed (regardless of which view I use) gets marked as read in two to three seconds of hovering on instead of five.
Good for you. I quit using newsblur for this lacking feature
mgunes - I’m not able to repro that at all. Im using 5s and it always takes 5s. Do you have something like “Auto-select first unread story” turned on?
Yes; in the preferences, “When opening a site” is set to “Open the newest unread story”. I’ll experiment with different timings and get back to you.
To give some more closure to this thread, mark as unread has now been added to the iOS app as well.
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Just moved to newsblur from Google Reader and am loving it! Thanks for all your work on this. (And by the way it was the picture of the cute beagle dog that made my husband and I join with a paid subscription. As beagle owners we understand how much they enjoy eating…)
Any word on when the Android app will receive mark as unread functionality?
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