Refreshing old feeds as if they're new

[LiamDawe]

I hope I'm not the only one seeing this: at random it will just refresh a feed, pulling in a bunch of old items as new.

It's happened repeatedly, seemingly at random, with all sorts of feeds.

One that happened today was for https://www.ogre3d.org/feed and I can see no reason why it would list a bunch of clearly old items as suddenly new again.

Fedora 37 Liferea 1.13.9

[LiamDawe]

Potentially related https://github.com/lwindolf/liferea/issues/791

[lwindolf]

The RSS feed in question has proper RSS tags that Liferea uses to identify already known items.

In this case the GUID is made from the webpage path. What often causes such effects is websites changing there path structure rewriting those URLs to something else and then also the GUIDs which are supposed to never change do suddenly change.

[LiamDawe]

Hmm, quite a nuisance, is there a way to get around this perhaps matching the titles and publish date as well to prevent duplicates?

[lwindolf]

Not really. Because GUIDs are supposed to be unique. The feed reader needs to trust them per spec. There are possible feed use cases where you want to post the same title+content twice (e.g. monitoring feeds reverting to service normal state) and the will require GUIDs to work.

The publisher is doing the wrong thing when changing GUIDs. We must not workaround this.

[mozbugbox]

Hmm, quite a nuisance, is there a way to get around this perhaps matching the titles and publish date as well to prevent duplicates?

You can create a filter for the feed and drop the guid tag for the items use the filter. Liferea will then use the link as GUID, I believe.

Or just create replace the GUID content by title+date with the filter.