Content repeatedly marked as unread

[Alkarex]

I also encountered the situation that the content was repeatedly marked unread. Has anyone found a solution now?

Originally posted by @i-iooi-i in #3571 (comment)

[Alkarex]

The problems are typically feed-specific, so this requires some debugging at feed level.

0. Debugging

An helpful start is to keep some copies of the feeds at various dates, to see what changes. Other relevant information include: is it the same URL, is it the same GUID (can be seen in the original feed and in the database), is it the same title, what is the publication date, etc. (see details below)
The point is that there is not a problem, but multiple different cases. And at the moment, I am not aware of any case when FreshRSS is at fault (but more debugging of concrete feed problems welcome).

1. Feeds, which change the content of their articles after publication

This is quite frequent. If you are not interested in being notified of the updates, unset the corresponding option (can be set at feed and/or global levels)

2. Feeds, which republish the same articles with a new GUID

This is a broken feed behaviour, but the workaround is to automatically mark as read articles with the same titles than recently received articles (can be set at feed and/or global levels)

See https://www.rssboard.org/news/217/unique-and-use-rss-guid-like-everybody

4. Feeds, with broken GUIDs (non-unique GUIDs)

This is also a broken feed behaviour. There should be lines in FreshRSS logs when the state of the feed changed from sane-GUIDs to/from broken-GUIDS. When the feed has broken GUIDs, FreshRSS switches to using the articles URLs as a unique identifier, instead of the standard GUID. The workaround is the same than 3.

• Note: we could add a new FreshRSS option to force using the article URL as unique article identifier for some problematic feeds.

5. Feeds, which republish passed articles again

This happens when a feed includes for instance the top 50 most recent articles, but decide to unpublish one or more of them. Suddenly, articles 51, 52, etc. might re-appear in the feed. FreshRSS by default already has an internal behaviour to minimize this issue, but the workaround is to make sure not to have a too strict purge policy. In particular, make sure that the Minimum number of articles to keep option is high enough (can be set at feed and/or global levels)

6. Feeds, which republish very old articles again

This happens sometimes when there is a change of back-end or other technical modifications. Although there are legitimate cases, this can often be undesired. The workaround is to automatically mark as new read articles, which have a very old publication date. (can be set at feed and/or global levels)
For instance, to automatically mark new articles as read, when their publication date is not in the last 30 days: