1610188 - RSS very unreliable and hard to use

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[Bill Dietrich]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

Steps to reproduce:

Several issues:

• Please allow adding an RSS feed that fails validation, if the failure is easily corrected. See for example the feeds https://feeds.megaphone.fm/HSW6099467034 and https://rss.acast.com/thelastpost Maybe make this a preferences setting, or an "Add anyway" button or "Fix problems" button in the "add new feed dialog" when validation fails.

• Some feeds result in a single message appearing when first added to TB, then never show any additional messages (even though new ones appear if you look at the feed through Firefox). See for example http://feeds.feedburner.com/pod-save-america

• It seems to me that some feeds behave differently if you delete each message after you read it, or if you leave all the old messages in the feed but marked read. New messages won't ever appear if you delete old messages in some feeds, I think. I can't give specific examples, I have too many feeds to keep track of this. Shouldn't new messages appear no matter what the user does with old messages ?

My sense is that about 1/5 of the RSS feeds I used to access in Firefox, which all worked fine, do not work properly through RSS feeds in Thunderbird. Either they can't be added or they don't show new messages. One or two were flagged by TB as "not a feed file", although I don't have an example I can cite at the moment.

Please fix the RSS feed feature. Thanks.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

IIRC feed validation in Thunderbird is more strict than Firefox. Please have a look at the list https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=15155221&product=MailNews%20Core&component=Feed%20Reader&query_format=advanced&resolution=---&resolution=INVALID&resolution=WONTFIX, because I suspect point #1 would be closed invalid or wontfix.

For anything that you feel isn't reported in the list please file one bug report per issue. Thanks.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

p.s. are you really using beta Thunderbird?

Comment 3

[Bill Dietrich]

Yes, I'm really using beta Thunderbird.

I've given up on RSS in Thunderbird. Switched to Liferea instead, and just about every problem just ... went away.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

These are not new in version 73, so setting version to 68

Comment 5

[alta88]

This bug is INVALID. Publisher failure to follow ancient and simple specs is publisher failure.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

per comment 5