[Request] Edit Feed URL From UI - not planned

[zero77]

• I have read the CONTRIBUTING.md and followed the provided tips

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
As far as i'm aware, It's not currently possible to edit the feed URL from the web ui.

Describe the solution you'd like
Could you please give an option to edit the URL, like you can currently when renaming a feed.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

[anoymouserver]

This is related to #666, which was closed due to concerns about uniqueness and avoiding duplicates.

Possible problems are, that it's hard to ensure that the new feed URL is for the same feed provider and not a completely different one (the user could e.g. switch from bbc.com to cnn.com). This could cause duplicate feed item guids (or, more likely, overwriting of existing items) or just refetching of all items because of changed guids.

A safer approach would be to directly address common reasons to update the feed url.

• provider switched to another URL using a 301 or 308 redirect ➔ automatically update the feed URL (like AntennaPod did in Update feed URL when redirected AntennaPod/AntennaPod#1394)
• feed now support https ➔ try to auto-upgrade the feed URL to https
• ...

[zero77]

@anoymouserver
Are there currently any other options on how to edit the feed urls.

[anoymouserver]

Unfortunately not, the only approach is #666 (comment) (which I had handled similarly for myself), but you have to know exactly what you are doing, since it's modifying the database which could break the app.

[ei8fdb]

Hi @zero77, can you give me some information to understand why you think it's necessary to be able to change the feed URL?

I'm responding as the issue is tagged with design label, and I'm not 100% sure why this (feature) would be needed.

I'm struggling to find any reason apart from a typo (which I think will be caught already). I'm sure I'm missing something! 😅

@anoymouserver's comments about the URL changing for some systematic reason seem better handled by the application itself. (As it will happen automatically)

[mhzawadi]

Hello 👋🏼

I have just had this exact issue, the proxmox news feed had stopped working (https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/press-releases?format=feed&type=rss). just returns a 404, so taking off the vars (https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/press-releases) does a redirect to https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-releases. Then get the new URL for the RSS feed (https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-releases?format=feed&type=rss).

I had to update the DB directly to fix this.

Maybe a domain check to see if the new URL is from the same domain?

[asz]

I have a few feeds which use plain HTTP. I want them to be replaced with HTTPS. Besides better security, I also hope that would cause updating favicons URLs, which currently aren't loading due to mixed content restrictions.

I also have a feed with basic authorization. It would be nice to have the ability to change the password part outside of the database.

[oldnomad]

Another use case for feed URL editing is when a site changes its domain name or significantly redesigns site structure. Typically, in this case the feed continues to work for some time (but often missing favicon), and then stops when the site owner decides to remove the redirect or drop the old domain.

What is needed in this case is some sort of "re-subscribe" that repeats the subscription process (probably with a different URL), updates url, location, favicon_link and link, but preserves all other feed attributes (including feed title and last_modified) and the articles.

[brezelman]

Some other use cases:

• The site offers different feeds with different scope and I want to switch from one to another (e.g. 'news' and 'top news only').
• The website owner changed the url of the feed.
• The feed made an incorrect 301 'moved permanently' (e.g. because of virus infection/misconfiguration) and I want to reset it.
• Website changed its content management system/rss provider system.

[Grotax]

Hello, i have spend some time to re-evaluate this topic.

My understanding is that users want to be able to edit the feed url via the web-ui/api.
And the reason why they want change can be different, but what is the same is that they want to keep the history (articles marked as read, starred items)

The expectation is that you can edit the url, news will fetch the feed and only show new items that have been added since the feed update broke last time.

Assuming this feature was implemented this will probably not work in many cases.
It is very likely that the guid of items in a feed will change if they are coming from a new url/system.
News uses the guid to determine if we already have an item or not, if we do not have it in the DB we add it.
That would mean that you would find new items in News that are actually old items.

What News already does is, following redirects that the feed author has set up.

So if the feed changed from http://->https:// we follow that and also store it as the location of the feed.
Same for other kind of redirects.

News can not make a difference between temporary redirects and permanent redirects we treat them all like permanent.
I can imagine that this aspect could be improved if the feed fetching library supports it.

But allowing all users to edit urls sounds to me like a bad Idea, this is something that can basically only be done by someone that knows what they are doing. Someone that checks before the url change if the guids of the items changed. And someone that can run sql queries to fix potential duplicate situations.

Just to explain duplicates, let's say the guids changed and now you have duplicates you need to transfer the state of the old items you had to the new one and then delete the old items. Deleting the new "bad" items will only result in News fetching them again.

TL;DR: There is no safe way to implement this for the average user, if you really want to do this, update the location field of the feed in the DB optionally the URL and hash but they are not used for fetching. And then deal with the issues that come up.