Mass unread flag flip

Do me a favor, if you’re able, and use the Mark Everything as Read dialog and mark it all read to some date back and see if stories jump again. If that happens then I’ll be able to pin down the culprit.

Gotcha - I had already cleared everything out after my post, but I just marked everything older than 3 days read. I’ll let you know when I notice the jump again.

Happened again, this time with HackerNews sometime overnight. I’ve marked the articles in that feed older than 1 day as read.

Not sure if this helps @samuelclay

How many unreads before and after?

It went from 503 (I think) to 60

Wait I thought it would go from a small handful of unreads to a larger number. Are stories from from unread to read??

Not sure if I’m being clear -

HN was showing 500+ unreads, and that’s when I made this post (Mass unread flag flip - #24 by boyblunder). Articles were going back to July 16th, and were showing as unread after I had already marked them as read (I try to keep a unread count of 0)

I marked all articles in HN that were older than 1 day as read, and the number went from 500+ to 60 (this seems expected, 60 articles for HN in 24 hours seems appropriate).

Does this make sense?

Same thing happened to me yesterday with that feed.

Just happened again in the last 2 hours with the New York Times - Top Stories.

Cleared it out this morning to 0 articles and ran around doing errands. Went to check again and I have new unread articles going back to July 16th.

So it went from 60 unread to 500? Seems like the mark read date is moving on you. I don’t know why that would happen unless it never moved.

Can you post the NewsBlur<feed_id> url of the feed from the web? And I assume your usernames are the same here as on newsblur.

So it went from 60 unread to 500?

Other way around - when I noticed it had pulled in week old articles, and I had 500+ unread items in HN, I marked older than 1 day as read and it went down to 60.

Here’re the NewsBlur feed IDs, and yes, my username is the same:

https://newsblur.com/site/5663943/nyt-top-stories
https://newsblur.com/site/6327282/hacker-news

I’ve been having the same issue with https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. It happened again a short while ago. Here’s info I know in case it helps:

  • My username is dil
  • The feed URL is same as above, https://www.newsblur.com/site/6327282/hacker-news

Behavior I’ve seen a handful of times over last few weeks is that I have 10s of posts I left unread to look at later, then unread count goes to 500 with everything marked unread, oldest one has always been same one that I marked saved from June 23. I curse a few times, then start going through the huge feed again trying to remember what I hadn’t read yet. It refreshes the count back to 500 every so often until I’ve trimmed the whole feed back down to 10s of articles. Then a while later it happens again, and I shed a tear. Haven’t noticed this on other feeds. I haven’t tried the ideas above of marking things done since this particular feed is so huge and I haven’t gotten through all the posts I want to read first. As it’s almost 30 days beyond June 23, I imagine if it happens again the start point will change. I didn’t look at the feed contents to see if ids were changing upstream, but I assume they didn’t since I see posts I saved still marked as such.

Does the number always go to 500 for everybody? Unread counts top out at 500 (maybe it should say “500+”), so when you read a story from a prolific feed like HN or NYT, the number briefly goes to 499 before it jumps back to 500. But that should be instantaneous and you would see it go immediately on the web. You wouldn’t see it on iOS/Android. Is that the case here?

Client-wise, I’m using Reeder, so I can’t speak to what’s happening on the web side of things.

I do see 500 for HN. On the web I can go through hundreds of posts before it pops back to 500. Or sometimes just a few. So not always instantaneous. A page refresh will force it back right away though.

I assume it’s unrelated, but it is kind of strange going quickly through very large feeds with the newer(?) behavior that posts are in order, but some partial selection is shown. So you think you went through a week of posts, but if you reload that feed again, there may be many unreads from that same time period it just didn’t show you before.

For what I was seeing with BoingBoing and the others I mentioned it was never quite that much. It seemed to be in the 100s usually, sometimes 300s.

Since upgrading to the new archive plan this week I haven’t had it happen again but I’m still watching for it.

nope

now there’s 1 legit new unread and 12 i had read dating back to 7/03

Happened again, but I can confirm HackerNews didn’t pull in 500 articles. It pulled in ~350 previously marked unread articles dating back to July 20.