Clear old news items

[tnonate]

I would like to see a way to clear out older news items as defined by the user. For example, "delete anything older than 7/15/30 days." Right now I have stuff in my feed from years ago that's serving no purpose and I don't know how to clear it out. It's more annoying than anything, but still a useful feature.

[Grotax]

Letting the user do that is not a good idea.

First news already deletes read items, by default everything above 200 read items will be deleted, the admin can modify that.
This can of course still leave very old items behind because the feed is rarely updated.

Letting the user delete items in the feed has the issue that the user does not know if that item is still in the feed file published by the feed author. If the user deletes an item that is still in that feed file the item would come back with the next update.

The only way to do this safely would be if news keeps items and only marks them as deleted at least until that item is no longer in the feed but that would require work on the items structure and the update mechanism the purge process would also need an adjustment.

[tnonate]

This can of course still leave very old items behind because the feed is rarely updated.

Let me make sure I'm understanding this correctly: Let's say I publish a blog post a week, and let's say I've only been publishing posts for two years. We'll call that 100 posts. By default, the news app might pull a blog post from two years ago or 18 months ago simply because it's closer than the 200 number?

[SMillerDev]

It'll fetch whatever is in the feed and keep it hits the maximum defined by the admin and it'll clean up old entries

[Grotax]

No,

look the way it works is news fetches the feed file from the server, that feed will contain x items usually feed generators will have some limit like a WordPress blog will not export all posts into RSS just the last X items.

Now News has these X items and checks for each one based on the guid a unique ID set by the feed generator if that item is already in the DB.

If the item is not yet in the DB News adds that Item as unread item to the DB.

Now User deletes Item Y from the DB.
News will fetch the feed again based on the schedule.

If now item Y is still in the feed news will check if that item is in the DB and will add it.

Result user is confused why item is back as new that he just deleted earlier.

What news already does is to purge read items but by default there is a limit set to keep 200 items, we also keep track of the items News gets per update per feed. So let's say the feed contains 300 items then News will keep 300 read items + all the unread items because otherwise you would see new items pop up.

You can change this number in the admin settings though and only keep 100 items per feed or less.