Several questions/thoughts from a new user

[larsen0815]

Hi Martin,

I just recently discovered RSS Guard and after some testing ditched my old reader that very same day. Your program is so much faster than the bloated and unmaintained RSSOwlnix where on every slow restart, I needed a workaround to get articles to open correctly. So, a big THANK YOU =)

While examining RSS Guard, I found some issues, but I don't want to create 20 new tickets right away. Maybe some of them are solely based on poor understanding on my side, so I opted for discussion for some of them. All of these are IMHO, feel free to reject any of them ;-)

Using the Lite variant in version 4.8.1 on Windows 11.

1. Why is this page opened after installation?
   https://rssguard.readthedocs.io/en/stable/downloads.html#windows
   I just installed the program, so downloading probably went fine ;-)
   Also, the page is opened in Microsoft Edge instead of using the default browser.

[solved] 2. The additional node "Unread" should be displayed by default.
At first, I was confused why there was no "Show me all unread articles of all feeds". Discovered it only by accident.
Edit: I just noticed that the "parent directory" already shows all unread articles.

3. When deleting an article, it is only marked as deleted, but still shown.
   There should be an option to also not display it anymore when deleting an article. Basically the same behaviour as deleting a file.

4. Add possibility to refresh a folder
   After having read some articles, I'd like to refresh the view "Unread articles" by pressing a shortcut (e.g. F5) to get rid of all the articles that are now marked as read.
   This would be a workaround for 3) above, but maybe might also have other benefits.

[solved] 5. Changing font sizes
How can I change the font size of the texts in the content frame? And "Written by ...", article name, date?

6. How can I get rid of the " / URL" in the content frame?

[solved] 7. Automatic database cleanup
I don't know if this already exists, but it would be nice to have an automatic database cleanup, e.g. every 14 days. At the moment, it seems to be necessary to do this manually via the menu "Tools"

8. UI improvements
   The menu item "Recycle bin(s)" should not use parenthesis.
   It looks a little bit... hmm... "strange" or "not clean" or so. Hard to describe. Looks wrong I guess.
   The menu item "Web browser & tabs" should be "Browser" as the current name is just too long and contains an ampersand. Same reason as above.

9. Pressing Del on a recycle bin should ask if the recycle bin should be emptied

10. The release page should state what the Lite variant is intended to be used for
    A link to https://rssguard.readthedocs.io/en/stable/variants.html would be good. Improving that with an explanation in which cases to choose one or the other would be optimal ("You should choose the Lite variant if you want to...")

[Ac314]

5. Changing font sizes
How can I change the font size of the texts in the content frame? And "Written by ...", article name, date?

Tools -> Settings -> Feeds & articles -> Articles -> Article browser font. But it will change the font for the whole article, not only the header.

7. Automatic database cleanup
I don't know if this already exists, but it would be nice to have an automatic database cleanup, e.g. every 14 days. At the moment, it seems to be necessary to do this manually via the menu "Tools"

Automatic cleanup is started (if enabled) when feeds are fetching. See Tools -> Settings -> Feeds & articles -> Feeds fetching -> Limiting amount of articles in feeds.

[Ac314]

Is there a global setting?

Can be also set per feed or per folder.

[larsen0815]

Per folder, I can only edit the child feeds, meaning that new feeds that might be added later, won't have the same settings.
Looking for a global setting in "Tools > Settings" (that presumably doesn't exist, yet).

[larsen0815]

I tried this by setting a maximum of 10 articles for every feed. After hibernation and starting again, RSS Guard suddenly displays hundreds of old articles that I had deleted before.
Reverted the article limit for all feeds, but the problem remains. Sometimes (don't know exactly when), I get old articles in a feed.

I can also reproduce the problem by deleting all of those old articles, and running a manual "cleanup database". After a "fetch all" I get all those old articles again. Probably everything that is available via the feeds. Seems like RSS Guard doesn't know which articles have already been downloaded before.

Any idea?

[Ac314]

I tried this by setting a maximum of 10 articles for every feed. After hibernation and starting again, RSS Guard suddenly displays hundreds of old articles that I had deleted before. Reverted the article limit for all feeds, but the problem remains. Sometimes (don't know exactly when), I get old articles in a feed.

I can also reproduce the problem by deleting all of those old articles, and running a manual "cleanup database". After a "fetch all" I get all those old articles again. Probably everything that is available via the feeds. Seems like RSS Guard doesn't know which articles have already been downloaded before.

Any idea?

Please provide URL for the feed in question.

[larsen0815]

All of them, so it doesn't seem to matter, e.g.:
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/feed/
https://www.heise.de/rss/heise-atom.xml
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/feed/

[Ac314]

With regards to the 2nd and 3rd feeds the reason is probably simple: they contain more than 10 articles. So after you check them the program deletes redundant articles (leaving only 10 of them), but they are still presented in the feed so after the next check they are downloaded again (because they were already deleted from the database). So the hibernation is not related to that.

The first feed contains 10 articles only, so it is strange behavior indeed. Are you sure it happens with this feed too?

[martinrotter]

My assumption on cleaning the DB is that deleted articles are purged, but RSS Guard still remembers that I once downloaded those so will not fetch it again. Maybe this is wrong?

If you clean DB via Database Cleanup dialog, then the articles are usually really purged.

[larsen0815]

Yes, what did you expect?

As I have written above that "RSS Guard still remembers (...)". I was using RSSOwlnix before. There I could delete articles, and they would not be downloaded again.

With RSS Guard, do I have to keep every deleted article so the program doesn't download it again?

[martinrotter]

You can delete articles with delete key from article list, they are then moved to recycle bin. You can even empty recycle bin and in both cases your articles will not be downloaded again.

If you purge your database then yes, articles will be downloaded again, naturally.

[larsen0815]

Ok, makes sense.

[Ac314]

As I have written above that "RSS Guard still remembers (...)". I was using RSSOwlnix before. There I could delete articles, and they would not be downloaded again.

If you delete articles and after the fetching they are not downloaded again it means only one thing: they were not deleted. They were just marked as deleted but actually kept in the database. So there was no real database "clean up", the program just hides these articles so you could not see them again. For example, QuiteRSS is doing just that (if I remember correctly), it does not delete anything, just marks messages as deleted.

With RSS Guard, do I have to keep every deleted article so the program doesn't download it again?

No, you should just set some settings correctly:

1. Set the option "Ignoring old articles". For example, if you open the program every day then no need to download the old messages because you already did it before. I personally set it globally to "5 days" - I do not need to downloaded the messages 5 days old because they were downloaded already.
2. Look at your feed and check how many messages it has for the last 5 days. For example, if there is about 1 message per day then you could safely set the limit of amount of articles to 10. In this case you will always have 10 last messages in the database, and when the program will automatically delete the message it will not be downloaded again because it is more than 5 days old already.
   Contrary to that, if your feed has about 20 messages per day then limiting it to 10 will not be enough (of course). You should set the limit to at least 100 (the overall amount of messages during 5 days).
   I use 10 as the global limit setting, and for more "lively" feeds I set it individually to 20, 50, 100 etc, depending on how many messages are posted for 5 days.
3. Do not forget to tick the options "Do not remove important messages" and "Do not remove unread messages", or, if you had no time to read the fresh messages, they will be automatically deleted as well.

With such "tuning" you will not need to delete anything manually, automatic cleaning will do it for you.

P.S. Of course, if you need to keep more last articles for your feeds then global limit 10 will not be enough for you. So you can adjust it accordingly.

[martinrotter]

I will re-test the feature on Monday to see if it really works as intended, but I believe it does.

[larsen0815]

@martinrotter
Care to comment on the other unsolved questions?
Or should I just create feature request issues for those?

[martinrotter]

Create separate discussions for each point, this is already too much for one single discussion.

[larsen0815]

Ok, will do.