271972 - Folder containing RSS Feeds should display all child feeds

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, enhancement)

Description

[Gavin Treadgold]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Running Thunderbird/0.9 (20041103)

Virtual folders created under News&Blogs should provide a collated list of all
feeds contained within the folder.



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a new folder called News under News&Blogs
2. Add a number of feeds to the News folder
3. Click on the News folder


Actual Results:  
The reading pane shows a blank list.

Expected Results:  
The reading pane should have presented a consolidated list of all the feed
entries contained within that folder, sorted by the chosen category - e.g.
date/time. In this way one can consolidate a number of different feeds into one
category for easy reviewing.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

you don't need a virtual folder to do that - you can tell each feed what folder
to download to, either at feed creation time or with manage subscriptions. Did
you create a virtual folder and then tell news&blogs to put the messages into
the virtual folder? That should be disallowed...

Comment 2

[Gavin Treadgold]

(In reply to comment #1)
> you can tell each feed what folder to download to

So you can. However that doesn't provide the functionality I was thinking of.
Sometimes it is useful to be able to just read a particular feed. At other times
it is useful to read a grouping of similar feeds. Having a feed direct its
articles to a particular folder allows you to agregate the articles, but you
can't then go back and just view a particular feed. Also, I noticed that if a
feed resides in a folder, then you cannot select that folder as a target for
feed articles.

> Did you create a virtual folder and then tell news&blogs to put the 
> messages into the virtual folder? That should be disallowed...

If that is what I tried above. Then it didn't work.

I guess what I am saying is that the current implimentation of newsfeeds in the
manage subscription window and the News and Blogs pane is inconsistent and needs
reworking into a more user-friendly model for the end user.

I believe it is incorrect to assign a target for a newsfeed - as the model
should be the same as mail (create folders and messages are stored in folders).
One should be able to create a folder, put newsfeeds in the folder, and then
they have the option of reading the feed individually, or by clicking on the
folder getting an aggregation of the feeds contained in the folder.

The subscriptions window is partly to blame for this because it is not suited to
managing a large number of feeds (they are presented in order of entry, and you
are not able to structure them there). Moving to a consistent folder based model
for both the subscriptions window and the News&Blogs pane would greatly ease
feed management for the end user.

Having feeds directing to different folders is adding complexity that is asking
for trouble with uninformed end users. They should just be able to drag a feed
to a folder, and have the folder act as a summary of all feeds in the folder.
This provides then a drag-and-drop mechanism for managing feeds that doesn't
currently exist.

Comment 3

[Gavin Treadgold]

(In reply to comment #0)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272040

I've raised a related bug suggesting that a folder structure is required for
managing a large number of newsfeeds. It would then tie in well with a folder
structure for reading feeds.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
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Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.

Comment 7

[Duncan]

See also Bug 325107 – subscribing to rss feeds should create a new folder by default
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325107

Comment 8

[alta88]

The design is that a feed account folder contains 0, 1, or many feed subscriptions. If you want to see only individual feeds, use 1 folder for 1 sub.  If you then want to see all feeds, create a virtual folder for the account with a rule or folder selection that spans all folders.