Closed Bug 451770 Opened 17 years ago Closed 17 years ago

feed item duplicates from yahoo news rss

Categories

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Product:
MailNews Core
Component:
Feed Reader
Platform:
x86
Linux
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: tuukka.tolvanen, Unassigned)

References

Details

specific case spun off bug 258465 --------8<-------- bug 258465 Comment #155 Karl 2008-08-22 04:40:08 PDT Set up a feed to look at any of the various Yahoo News RSS links, and it will appear within hours, along with a whole host of other places. -------->8-------- Specify the thunderbird version you are using (Help -> About), and an example feed url. (This is a cooperative sport, so you need to pay attention to opportunity costs related to such information; steps to reproduce that require searching and uncertainty about what exactly you tested reduces the likelihood of people investigating those steps, as something else is more likely to appear to have better return for their effort.) If you can get duplication by refreshing with a single feed content version, save and attach that version and attach it here; if getting dup items requires a sequence of feed content versions, try to save such a sequence.
Blocks: 258465
Original thread: 2004-09-08 09:21 PDT Now running: version 2.0.0.16 (20080708) Uh, cooperative sport eh? I posted my report on this a very long time ago, and recently (the last couple of days) there was a specific code snippet that could be put into a static page that reproduced it. I've frankly given up on Thunderbird for RSS as after 4 years, I can't imagine anyone ACTUALLY cares. I will put the effort into coming up with a reproducable example (note that I have a forum where I can GENERATE one on purpose) provided that someone's actually going to fix this AND new releases will be blocked until it is. Cooperative sport, fine. Demonstrate that I'm not wasting my effort in this "cooperative sport".
> I posted my report on this a very long time ago, and recently (the last couple > of days) there was a specific code snippet that could be put into a static page > that reproduced it. Sorry -- presuming you mean you mean bug 389503 here -- I thought I searched for bugs filed by you before filing this one, but apparently not... What code snippet do you mean, bug 258465 comment 154 perhaps? Whichever snippet it is, have you checked that the issue it exhibits has the same root cause as the yahoo news rss thing or your forum thing? > I will put the effort into coming up with a reproducable example (note that I Great! As for commitments, I have neither the resources nor the authority, and I happen to agree with drivers on the blocking- wanted+ on bug 258465 anyway. (Wanted+ is a list that's currently about the same size as blocking+, things that are considered important but not blocking.) What you and I can demonstrate is progress in untangling the issue into manageable, reproducible, fixable parts.
> > I posted my report on this a very long time ago, and recently (the last couple > Sorry -- presuming you mean you mean bug 389503 here -- I thought I searched > > I will put the effort into coming up with a reproducable example (note that ah, and if your testcase is on the bug 389503 case, then that testcase belongs there, rather; I filed this bug to look into the yahoo news rss dups case you mentioned, which may or may not have quite the same root cause.
At least so far, the Yahoo News case seems to be "they do silly things." I subscribed to http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/oddlyenough (since my tolerance for real news is low), and after three days got one thing I would call a duplicate if I was just reading, two items for "Suspect in golf cart eludes Utah sheriff cruisers (AP)" but because one links to http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081019/ap_on_fe_st/odd_golf_cart_chase and the other links to http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081020/ap_on_fe_st/odd_golf_cart_chase and they changed the guid to "ap/20081020/odd_golf_cart_chase" for the new one, those *are* two items. Even though you don't want to read it again just to find out that an AP editor who wasn't around on Sunday thought that the first paragraph should be three sentences long, not just one, Yahoo is using every mechanism RSS offers to say that the new item is a different thing, not a correction of a previous item.
Agreed that Yahoo News feeds are incredibly annoying with all the duplicates, but in fact I stopped getting annoyed by them in Thunderbird yesterday, and started getting annoyed by them in other feed readers instead. We're showing duplicate items in them for the same reason everyone else does: because their feeds are full of duplicate items pretending to be different.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 17 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
I'm not convinced that is the reason why. I still think that, whatever other sites or Yahoo are doing, if duplicate entries are the status-of-the-art of rss feeds, then Thunderbird shall consider to detect and exclude them from view.
No. This bug is not about other sites, it's about Yahoo News feeds, and they are not state-of-the-art, they are broken. There are perfectly valid reasons to have an RSS feed that says the same things on different days with different links (status feeds saying "The tinderbox 'Win2k3 comm-central check' is in flames" are a classic example), there are ways to say that an item in a feed is a correction to a previous item which Yahoo is not using, and there is absolutely no reason for Yahoo to put the exact same item with absolutely no changes in their feed twice with two different links. You are of course welcome to write the code to check every incoming item against the titles and descriptions of all previously seen items, to hide things that you believe are unintentional duplicates, but please make it available as an extension, so we don't have to massively slow down the program for everyone and hide legitimate new items in feeds which intentionally use the same text with different links, just to cater to Yahoo's broken feeds.
This is the same old story of this and other bugs involving duplicates in rss feeds. Thunderbird developers endlessly repeat this has to do with broken feeds, while users are voting for encouraging developers to end this hopelessly broken and useless rss reader of thunderbird. If I was able to code, you can bet your axe I would fix it for you.
Component: RSS → Feed Reader
Product: Thunderbird → MailNews Core
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