Reduce double posts?

[muellerto]

Would it be possible to reduce double posts?

Sometimes, especially in the morning when I open up and have 120 entries, I have several posts which come as results of changes made after publishing. I have indeed articles with four or five changes. I would say in my case about 5...7% of the posts are doubled.

Of course the user should always get the last version because this is probably that one the author want's you to read (otherwise he or she wouldn't make changes). But when you as a reader have several versions of the same post in your list and you read it one by one from the oldest to the newest (that's typical) then you get all these versions, also the superseded ones. And probably you have then even no chance to see what the change has been. Not good.

Yes, the headline can also change. But in the very most cases the headline is a good item to compare to detect double posts. And there are still additional items: the feed URL, the author.

It would be good if at least the amount of new posts displayed to the user could be free of double posts.

[Athou]

Actually CommaFeed doesn't update entries when they change, there's an open issue to add this feature. If you see duplicates, it probably means existing entries were republished in the feed with a new id (or a different link if there was no id). Are you seeing this behavior for all your feeds or only some of them? Do you mind sharing them here?

[muellerto]

Not in all feeds, I have a lot. But every bigger news portal (where real people write articles) has this phenomenon. I'll try to get one.

Yes, probably these doubles have new IDs and/or timestamps. That's why I said comparing the headline would be a good criterion. The very most changes are in the body.

[muellerto]

Here, this Swiss news feed has a double. The headline is:

Kult-Komiker «Mein Dinner mit Adolf»: Larry Davids Trump-Satire wirft hohe Wellen

Both have the same timestamp 4/23/2025, 3:50:11 PM.

In the same feed there's another double, the headline is:

Überraschender Rücktritt: Das WEF wird wegen der Causa Schwab vom Bund unter Druck gesetzt

Both have the same timestamp 4/23/2025, 5:14:04 PM.

[muellerto]

Waaahhh, sorry, I have it!

These doubles are not in the same feed - sometimes the news portal provides the same article indeed in two different feeds! I subscribed four feeds from there.

OK, forget this problem for the moment until I know more. I'll try to analyze more doubles.

[muellerto]

Forget it. I never had double posts short after each other since friday. All my doubles came from the same provider in his multiple feeds. I changed this in my subscriptions. Commafeed does it right.