Mark all stories in a feed as unread

idea
#1

Copying this from a reply I’d made to an older slightly-related thread, just posting again in case that reply was too buried to be seen.

Also, to be clear, I like Newsblur quite a lot. From all of the RSS readers I’ve tried, it’s got a great focus on power-use and customizability. Posting this to try to help make it even better!

With the archive tier, is there a way to make sure all backfilled stories are added as “unread”? When I upgraded to the archive tier, the backfills ran, but all of the stories were added as “read” which made the backfill pretty useless since there’s no way to tell which stories are old but new to me and which I’d actually read.

Even when I add a new feed now, all stories older than 30 days are added in a “read” state.

In my settings, I have had the “automatically mark a story as read” setting set to never since before I upgraded to premium archive, but this is still happening

Am I just missing something? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I can’t recommend the premium archive tier until this works differently though. Even if I’ve been making a mistake to cause everything to be backfilled in a “read” state, and that’s not how things are supposed to work, there’s another issue. There’s no way to bulk mark stories as unread, but many ways to bulk mark stories as read. If you make any mistake with bulk marking as read, there’s no way to undo that or fix it later. The Archive tier feature is a great idea, but this UX issue makes me unable to trust it for organizing my reading progress across thousands of stories.

Thanks!

#2

There is not a way to mark all stories as unread. I’ve heard this from a few users who would like it, so if you are finding yourself wanting to mark all of a feed’s stories as unread, let me know and I may add a button to the Feed Settings dialog. It won’t be global but you should be able to mark everything as unread on a per feed basis.

#3

This would help me currently: I’m switching some feeds from email to Newsblur, because I want to read them more but dislike email, and have thus accrued a number of unread stories, which status I want to carry over. For few dozen stories, the keyboard shortcuts do the trick, but an “unread” equivalent to the “mark newer stories read” context menu option would have been more comfortable.