A feed I subscribe to changes its RSS URL occasionally, as a nod to subscriber-only content. Seeing something weird on it I figured the URL had changed so I got the latest one and added it. Didn’t change the situation so I went to delete the newly added feed — and lost both the original and the new. I subsequently realised that the URL hadn’t changed when I received your automatic “Backup OPML due to multiple removals” email.
So: if I add the same feed URL twice, it seems you’re happy to have that feed in my site list twice, but if I remove it once you remove both instances. Inconsistent, and I think I’d prefer to have the add fail.
Unless you can think of a reason for having a feed twice…?
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It’s tricky because what happens when you change a feed’s addresses that you’re actually branching the feed, since other people may be subscribed to that feed and do not intend to change the address. So the logic is a bit hairy when dealing with branched feeds and duplicates. I’ve got some unit tests that cover deletion of sites but when we’re talking branched sites, there are possibly some cases that I do not handle well.
Not sure I’m understanding you entirely, but in this instance I wasn’t editing the existing feed because at that point I hadn’t worked out how to: I actually just added the URL again, as a new feed, just pressing the + button in the bottom left hand corner (web interface). I only realised it was the same URL when I examined the OPML email after the deletion took 'em both out.
Are feeds then identified by something other than URL? That kindof makes sense since “view source” typically shows three or four feed URLs; not being overly familiar with RSS I could believe maybe there’s some kind of UID thing in there somewhere.