TL;DR: MSI product download feeds don’t work in Newsblur, and I’m not sure if it’s a problem on the Newsblur side or the MSI side.
The tech company MSI provide per-product RSS feeds for downloads (e.g. motherboard BIOS updates). Here is an example: MAG B550 TOMAHAWK MAX WiFi (NB: the two slashes in the URL are not a typo, that’s what gets generated)
The issue is, when I add the feed to Newsblur, I see these items:
This shows the latest post as 10 Apr 2025, when the actual latest download available is from 25 May 2026:
Looking at the feed XML file, that later post is present right at the end:
And running the feed XML through the W3C validator, it’s clear that lots of the entries have the same
guid value:
I just wanted to double-check before I report the bug to MSI that this is the cause of the issue, and not that Newsblur is getting confused because the feed entries aren’t in chronological order (or something else that I’ve missed). Because this thread suggests that the entries with matching guids should override one another (but weren’t, at least as of 2013), in which case I would expect only the latest BIOS version to appear.
Thanks for the detailed report and for digging into the XML, that made this much faster to pin down.
I traced it through and it’s a bug on MSI’s side. Their per product download feed reuses the same <guid> across many different entries, and the RSS spec says a guid has to uniquely identify each item. NewsBlur (like most readers) treats the guid as the unique key for a story, so when MSI hands out the same guid for different downloads, those entries collapse into a single story.
The worst offenders are all the entries with a blank download name (the ones that show up as just “Download:”). MSI gives every one of them the same guid, so roughly twenty separate releases, including your May 25 2026 one, all merge into one story. That merged story keeps the date of the first one NewsBlur ever saw, which is back in 2022. The newest entry that still has its own unique title is the April 10 2025 “Warning Safety Notice”, which is why that’s the latest date you see.
So the out of order dates aren’t the issue, NewsBlur handles those fine. It’s purely the duplicate guids.
There isn’t a clean fix I can make on the NewsBlur side without breaking normal feeds. Reusing a guid is exactly how a publisher signals “this is an update to an existing story,” so I have no reliable way to tell that apart from MSI accidentally reusing a guid for a completely different file. The real fix is for MSI to give each download a stable, unique guid. Worth reporting it to them.
