I made a request here to basically switch off the auto mark-as-read a few months ago, which was turned down. I made a comment with a sort of counter offer, but that’s gone unresponded to. I don’t know what the protocol for such followups is on here so I’m raising the counter-offer idea again as a new topic.
The reason for not tracking the unreads indefinately was the amount of processing required. Fair enough - on a site like Boing-Boing, if I leave something unread for 30 days, I’m probably never going to get around to reading it.
The reason I wanted the limit raised was for a daily web comic. It posts one new link each day and Newsblur only keeps track of 30 links before it auto-marks-read them. Shirley NewsBlur servers can handle more than 30 records in its database for a single feed? (It happily handles many times more for busier feeds.)
My counter suggestion - Throw out the number-of-days limit and replace it with a number of links per feed, say 500.
For Boing-Boing and similar feeds, it won’t make a difference. Links will expire after around 30 days as normal.
For the webcomic, a limit of 500 would mean I could leave a strip unread for around a year and a half before I lost my place. If I left a comic for that long I’m probably never going to pick i up again.
I hope you’ll consider making this change. Bill.