[Feature request] Deleting individual items

[mpedramfar]

It seems like nextcloud doesn't have the option to delete individual news items. (#228)
The autopurge option is good, but for me, it doesn't replace having the option to delete the items.

[anoymouserver]

Manually deleting (recent) items wouldn't work, as they would simply be added back the next time the feed is fetched.
The purging algorithm ensures that at least the amount of items per fetch is kept in the datebase (more about that in the docs).

By simply marking them as read, they will be hidden from your view until deletion is possible.
If that's not hidden enough, the feature request would be more like 'hiding' items, since they have to stay in the database.

If you want to keep the lowest possible number of items, set the 'Maximum read count per feed' to a low number such as 5 and enable 'Delete unread articles automatically'.

[mpedramfar]

This is a user experience issue so I think "hiding" them in the backend, as you mentioned, would be a great solution.

When I'm using RSS, one of the main issues is the clutter, so being able to clean and get rid of unwanted stuff is good. Of course you can choose to only see unread articles, but the read articles (together with the unread articles in a single category) are still there and the user can see them. It still feels cluttered somehow.

If I use the act of marking an article as read as a part of the process of deleting it, then the naming feels unnatural.
It's as if you took an average RSS reader, then renamed "All articles" to "Unread articles" and then removed the "Recycle bin" and replaced it with a new category called "All articles" which contains all of the normal articles plus the recycle bin.

[SMillerDev]

When you think of an rss feed like a news source this feature makes very little sense, you don't really delete news. You either read it or you don't.

[mpedramfar]

That's true, if the only use case is for news. I would argue that the current setup could make using it more difficult for people who are subscribed to feeds that are not news.

Some of RSS feeds that I subscribe to are for blogs and articles that I would like read carefully and not miss anything. So I don't like the software to randomly delete something just because I forgot to mark it (as unread, "keep unread", or starred) after I skimmed through it. If I want a clean environment, I should set a low "autopurge count" and set the cronjob to autopurge every 5 minutes or something, but then I have to be careful not to accidentally leave an article unread or it'll be gone.

Using RSS for news is of course quite important, but having the option to delete wouldn't make this software more difficult to use for people who use RSS exclusively for news. They can simply not use this option if they want to.

[SMillerDev]

I would say it makes the user experience of Nextcloud News more difficult for people who use it for news. I would be opposed to adding a 3rd state button to news articles in the default UI for this very specific use case of "I want to keep everything until I delete it manually"

[mpedramfar]

This app is called Nextcloud News, so I can't really argue for other use cases, but if the goal is to be a general RSS reader, then it might be fair to consider all use cases of RSS.

Let's consider two types of RSS feeds:

1. Feeds that output many articles, like daily news. In this case, you may only need to go through any given article once. It's not necessarily a big loss if you accidentally miss some articles. Using a social media like twitter or reddit for these kinds of articles might work, since there could be way too many articles and social media will use its algorithm to sort through them and will show you more popular articles.

2. Feeds that may output only a few articles every once a while, but all the articles are important. This could be weekly news in some area or research articles or blog posts. In these cases, you may need to skim through the article then leave and later come back to read more. Using a social media for these kinds of articles is not ideal. They're more suited for an email inbox rather than something like twitter.

The current setup is not ideal for the second type. Currently, we have two options:

1. Low autopurge count:
   In this case, articles of type 2 might be accidentally deleted unless you take action to make sure they're not.
2. High autopurge count or no autopurge:
   In this case, you can't really get rid of the clutter. If you accidentally open and close an article, then good luck finding which one it was among the read and not yet deleted articles.