Feed issue: some feeds from stackexchange don't update

[31SFX4]

I subscribe to various feeds from stackexchange communities, and strangely some of them update correctly, while others don't, even though presumably they use the same system.

The W3C feed validator says "Use of unknown namespace: http://purl.org/atompub/rank/1.0" both for the feeds that work and those that don't, so I don't know if this is a problem and why it still works with some.

Examples of feeds that don't update:

• https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/feeds
• https://math.stackexchange.com/feeds
• https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/feeds

Feeds that do update:

• https://chinese.stackexchange.com/feeds
• https://physics.stackexchange.com/feeds/hot

Also, generally thank you for this newsreader, it must be hugely difficult and frustrating with lots of feeds that don't quite follow the rules. Having said that, it would be good if it was easier to diagnose why feeds are not working with a meaningful error or something.

[Grotax]

Hey thanks for your positive feedback, yea it's very difficult we have these standars of rss and atom (+ others) but the generators not always follow them correctly.
If you then implement a parser that goes strictly by rule those feeds fail, if you configure it loosely it becomes super difficult.
I wouldn't be surprised if the big commercial projects have a plugin system and implement individual parsers, probably outsourced into a country where work is cheap.

Anyway I checked your feeds and I have no idea why they wouldn't update.

[31SFX4]

When I have time, I will try to diagnose why on my systems these feeds don't update, but it might be a bit of detective work...

Question: Is there perhaps a limit of how many feeds or items are updated each time, so that the first x feeds are updated but not all the others? Or does the update perhaps stop when it encounters one error so that subsequent feeds are always ignored? (Sorry if these are stupid questions, but I don't understand the code enough yet).

On the general issue of non-standard feeds, you might be right that the commercial services have lots of fixes. Unfortunately we probably have to live with this. It's a difficult decision for the reader: from a programming perspective it's better to stick to the standard, but for the user it's frustrating if feeds don't work.

[Grotax]

Is there perhaps a limit of how many feeds or items are updated each time, so that the first x feeds are updated but not all the others?

No

Or does the update perhaps stop when it encounters one error so that subsequent feeds are always ignored? (Sorry if these are stupid questions, but I don't understand the code enough yet).

Yes but you should see an error in your logs.

On the general issue of non-standard feeds, you might be right that the commercial services have lots of fixes. Unfortunately we probably have to live with this. It's a difficult decision for the reader: from a programming perspective it's better to stick to the standard, but for the user it's frustrating if feeds don't work.

We use feed-io as a feed parsing library the maintainer already shifted to allowing things beyond the standards but he is developing it on his own in his free time, while I can imagine for a commercial project to have multiple stages, analysts, architects, developers the easier the task the easier it is to outsource it to near or off-shore.
We will never be able to compete with that, what we offer is a free and open software that runs on top of nextcloud.

[31SFX4]

Or does the update perhaps stop when it encounters one error so that subsequent feeds are always ignored? (Sorry if these are stupid questions, but I don't understand the code enough yet).

Yes but you should see an error in your logs.

Ah, ok, thanks, that probably explains why some feeds are never updated if they come after a totally unrelated broken feed. So I just have to find out which other feed(s) cause the issue.

We will never be able to compete with that, what we offer is a free and open software that runs on top of nextcloud.

Yes, of course; I did not mean to criticise or badmouth your work. It is very important to have a newsreader that is not commercial and where we have full control of the data. So, again, thanks for your efforts!