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#1 2013-04-24 17:25:09

GugUser
Member
From: Quito (Ecuador)
Registered: 2007-12-16
Posts: 1,477

news reader reports altered articles although nothing has been changed

In different Textpattern powered websites I observe the same behavior:

The news reader reports an altered article, although I know that nothing has been changed in the reported article.

I discovered the following context: At the same moment in another article (important: in an other article) the date had expired. Is this a bug or why has Textpattern this behavior?

Last edited by GugUser (2013-04-24 17:25:37)

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#2 2013-04-25 16:52:25

GugUser
Member
From: Quito (Ecuador)
Registered: 2007-12-16
Posts: 1,477

Re: news reader reports altered articles although nothing has been changed

Some idea?

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#3 2013-04-25 18:24:11

Gocom
Developer Emeritus
From: Helsinki, Finland
Registered: 2006-07-14
Posts: 4,533
Website

Re: news reader reports altered articles although nothing has been changed

If you are talking about feeds, the items in them are identified by their UID. In RSS by the guid field and in Atom by the ID field. Textpattern handles those values correctly; each UID is unique and Textpattern does not change them on its own. Each UID is permanent; there is no option to change it.

What you might be experiencing is a badly made news reader. You are supposed to store those UIDs, and filter new items based on them, but some readers may actually be checking and comparing the contents of the feed — which is exactly what you are not supposed to do.

For instance, when you mark an article expired, depending on your syndication preferences (which you can change in your Preferences panel), it may disappear from the feeds. This allows other articles to get on the feed (which by Atom/RSS design, is limited to certain number of items). A reader may think this is new content if it has never before discovered it, or if it has seen the UID before, it’s a faulty reader.

In short, there is no this type of known bug in the feed handling, While Textpattern is faulty in many areas, it does this right. The problem is likely the items that changing on the feed, and either discoring, or that the reader is badly made. Due to discovery outages you may either;

  • Make sure items never are taken away from the feeds (e.g. setting expired items as syndicated).
  • That the syndication is done on a server and is not client based. Clients can check content only when used, which causes outages. Clients can not see all UIDs, content changes faster than they check for it.
  • …if neither are of favor, getting a client that uses timestamps in addition to UIDs to filter out faulty updates.

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#4 2013-04-26 00:15:52

GugUser
Member
From: Quito (Ecuador)
Registered: 2007-12-16
Posts: 1,477

Re: news reader reports altered articles although nothing has been changed

Thanks Jukka. Yes, I was talking about feeds.

I don’t know if my newsreader (NetNewsWire) is badly or well made.

Confusing is that it shows a random article as updated at the moment, when another article reached the expiration date.

It’s not a big problem, but is something confusing.

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