Marking focus items as read also marks hidden articles as read - why is this still an issue?

I typically have hundreds of daily articles across all my feeds, although I don’t have time to read all of them each day. I get to all of them eventually, but I like the idea of the ‘focus’ view, so on my busy days I can read the handful of articles that fall into specific topics and save everything else for another time.
However, it doesn’t seem to work that way. I’ve repeatedly had hundreds of unread articles marked as read, simply because I scrolled through my ‘focus’ articles.

I would ask ‘why does this happen’, but after reading similar posts going back to 2013, my real question is ‘why does this STILL happen?’ Supposedly this is by design, but if that’s the case, then it’s a poor design, with no warning or way to undo the action. It doesn’t even mark ALL articles as read, just the ones that were posted up until the last focus article, which makes it seem more like a bug than an intentional design choice.

On that note, I should point out that this doesn’t seem to happen in the beta android version of the app, only the browser version. That said, I prefer using the browser version. Is there no workaround for this issue?

This sounds like an issue I’d like to fix!

So let’s figure out exactly what’s happening. You’re just scrolling with mark-read-on-scroll turned on, right? You’re not talking about hitting a mark feed/folder as read. If so, yeah, unread stories shouldn’t be marked as read if you’re on focus.

Thanks for the quick response – you are correct, I’m not hitting a button to mark anything as read. I scroll past the articles and they’re marked as read automatically.

I could not reproduce this issue. I switched to focus, read a feed that had a mix of focus and unreads, and then went back to unread, and all of the unread stories were still there. So this may be account or folder specific!

By the way, a screenshot or two of this happening (hopefully straightforward to reproduce) would help immensely.

One thing I’ve noticed is that when I first click on the Focus button, it takes quite awhile to load (several seconds), almost as if it’s marking the other items as read before it finally reaches the few that are in focus.

It doesn’t happen every time, but it does happen pretty frequently. I’ll try to grab screenshots of the before-and-after, but as I mentioned it’s usually after I’ve got several hundred articles already built up. Today I lost ~600, so that might take 3-4 days to get back to that level.

I lost over 1000 posts today alone because of this issue, and hundreds more over the past couple of weeks. It doesn’t happen every single time, but frequently enough that I’m pretty much done using this service. As I mentioned before, people have complained about this problem since 2013, yet it still happens for me at least 2-3 times a week, if not more. I’m not going to take multiple screenshots every time I use the service in the hope I can demonstrate what is happening, especially since I feel it has been explained thoroughly. I didn’t sign up and pay money to use a broken product or be a beta tester. Best of luck.

Can you share a single full browser screenshot of what your reading setup looks like? I want to mirror it exactly and see if I can reproduce it. The biggest problem here is that stories shouldn’t be marked as read if you’re scrolling them. If you mark the feed/folder as read, then it can’t be focus-exclusive. But this sounds like it should be.