I’ve spent 10 minutes painstakingly marking >50 stories unread, because it’s a blog I found rather interesting.
Imagine my frustration when all those “unread” marks disappeared.
I have since found out that there’s an arbitrary limitation that prevents stories older than 2 weeks being unread. How very arbitrary.
Could you at the very least refuse to mark stories unread “temporarily”? Much better, though, is enabling full support for “unread” of older stories.
The issue is that stories older than 2 weeks will never be unread, period. Stories are automatically marked as read at the 2 week limit. At that point, if stories were left unread, you’d have a heck of a maintenance job to do.
I would love to disable the mark as unread button for stories older than 2 weeks, and I have it on my list, since it’s not terribly difficult to do. But the real issue is that you would like to keep a bunch of stories unread for as long as possible. Perhaps saving those stories would help? Why do they need to be unread? Couldn’t you read them in their read state, since they are all more than 2 weeks old?
Ideally, I’d *love* to get unreading working for stories older than 2 weeks, but it’s an enormous amount of work—time that I am spending working on the iPhone app, the big social features, and a ton of other bug fixes. I prioritize unreads beyond 2 weeks as a lower priority improvement since it’s such an edge case.
> Couldn’t you read them in their read state, since they are all more than 2 weeks old?
Well, I could certainly just read them without an RSS reader in the first place. To me, the biggest benefit of a reader is keeping track of what I’ve read and what I haven’t read.
I’ve seen you mention that it’s an enormous amount of work a few times. Perhaps if you explained in a blog post why this is so hard people would be more appreciative. It sounds like simply increasing “14 days” to a larger number of days is a fairly small amount of work.
Is it the sheer amount of data you have to store? Then perhaps you could make it a paid feature? In that case I pledge to subscribe if this enables me to keep track of unreads for 1000 days instead of 14 
I absolutely agree. I’m subscribed to blogs that I only read every 2 months or so and it is very annoying that I have to track my state elsewhere. One of the things that made me flee Google Reader was the 1-month limit for unread posts and now I get even less? *sob*
Unlimited unread backlog, if built, would most certainly have to be available to all, not just premiums.
Anyway, I *could* just build an extra unread_stories collection, and check against that for every call. But would the stories ever expire? No? Not even after a year? Hmm, then there’s all the unread counts, which would have to take into account these phantom stories. It’s rife with risk and potential slow-downs, for a piece of the system that’s so critical to get right. It would take some time and I only have so much of it left to work on new features.
I do promise to come back to this feature. I love the idea and want it to happen, but it’s going to have to be after I ship social.
That’s all we can ask for!
BTW, in principle I would only need _one_ marker per feed, because I read most feeds in strict chronologial order.
I don’t necessarily need ALL the unread stories saved forever, but having the oldest unread story stick around forever is important for me.
I use newsblur to read webcomics and/or webnovels.
I sometimes like to wait for a few weeks (or more) so that when I read I can read a whole lot at once.
I’m talking about webnovels and webcomics… in this situation I’ll never even have 100 unread stories for that single site! They disappear after 2-3 weeks even if there’s only 10 saved. This was the whole reason I use newsblur and why I signed up for premium.
For the sites where I get tons of stories (e.g. tumblr) I don’t care if it auto marks as read the oldest ones. But for sites where there’s at most 2 per day (and usually much less) and I can’t keep a 4 week backlog… that doesn’t work well for me.