506726 - "No Feed Summary" warning is obnoxious for rss entries with no summaries

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[Peep Chaintreuil]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090702 Gentoo Firefox/3.5.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090702 Gentoo Firefox/3.5.1

Everytime I click on a feed which offers no feed summary, I get a popup that reads:

------------------------------------------------
[No Feed Summary]
------------------------------------------------
This is a news feed in an old format, which does
not store the Summary of the news item. 
Therefore it cannot be displayed.
                              [ OK ]
------------------------------------------------

Seeing as how I have no control over if other people's feeds are old or new or even standards compliant, I really don't care about this warning.

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
The message should not be displayed to the user.  It should just go into the error console where those who care can find it.

Fix this before releasing 3.0.

This only happens on certain posts, I don't know what it is.  (complexity?)

It will only happen after the post is fully loaded, I think.

I do not have the per feed checkbox on for just displaying summaries.  (I display full articles.)

I have seen this on posts from:
- Feed: http://consumerist.com/index.xml
  Article Title: "3 Big Banks Sued For Overdraft Fee Practices [Fees]"
  Website URL for article:  http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/consumerist/full/~3/_AE5G7EiOLc/3-big-banks-sued-for-overdraft-fee-practices

- Feed: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/atom.xml
  Article Title: "Hall-of-Fame Incentives"
  Website URL for article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreakonomicsBlog/~3/YSyopQfojeU/

  http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/atom.xml

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

> Seeing as how I have no control over if other people's feeds are old or new or
> even standards compliant, I really don't care about this warning.

The warning is actually not about the feed format (on wire) but about the format thunderbird2 used to store feeds on disk in.

Agreed though, it's obnoxious, but you won't likely see it more than a day or however long time it takes you to read up on the already downloaded feeds.

Comment 2

[Peep Chaintreuil]

Ahh.  That explains why it seemed so random as to what I was seeing it on.

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Users who tend to use the feed reading feature to read new messages won't encounter this alert much, but those who go back and reread old ones will experience it more often, and I can see how it would be annoying, since you can't do anything about what it says and it's not clear when it will and won't show up.

On the other hand, it could also be confusing to see the web pages of feed messages when you've asked Thunderbird to show you just their summaries.

A few options for improving the situation (the first two of which aren't mutually exclusive):

1. display the message in a notification bar rather than a modal dialog;
2. add a checkbox to the dialog to "no longer warn me about this problem";
3. don't display the message at all.

Of these, 1+2 seems the optimal solution giving the competing concerns, while 3 is the easiest to land.

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Attachment: proposed fix

String freeze coming up in a few days - let's go with 3 = just don't display the dialog.

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

Comment on attachment 403058 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed fix

>+    if (gShowFeedSummaryToggle || pref.getIntPref("rss.show.summary") == 1)
Nit: unnecessary check, now that all we're doing is setting it to false.

Comment 7

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Comment on attachment 403058 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed fix

r=myk

Comment 8

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Comment on attachment 403058 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed fix

I'm always up for killing a dialog.  Could someone  file a followup bug for looking into either solution 1 or 2 for the future?

Comment 9

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

We could, but since it's basically something you'd possibly see the day you upgrade from tb2 to tb3, and once or twice again when you go through old feed msgs seems like a lot of work for little gain.

Comment 10

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

changeset:   3972:89fecce4ed6b
http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/89fecce4ed6b

->FIXED

Re the nit: the check is "unnecessary", but it makes it clearer what the code does. (If say, someone actually wants to do more things there later.)