Kontact feedreader downloading multiple copies, repeatedly

[tomcloyd]

I've just started using Kontact, and have a problem with its feedreader loading duplicate copies of the items in my feeds. This is alarming, and I don't know how to stop it or clean up the mess. In one day I have acquired 756 unread feed items. Uh....an update: 1220 copies. Of a number of items I now have FIVE duplicate copies. What the heck is this thing doing?? How do I get it to stop. How can I purge the duplicates easily??

I've searched the forums, and Google, and am not coming up with anything useful.

Update: Have just discovered that this is happening ONLY with FeedZilla feeds. Don't know what this means or how to respond, however...

Any suggestions?

[cowb0y]

Re: Kontact feedreader downloading multiple copies, repeatedly

What version of Akregator/KDE are you running (Help / About...s)? You can right-click on a feed to change it's update interval (to, say, manual). Try deleting the feed and recreating it. Look at the feed url itself (publish it here?). Maybe there's a static part and some sort of parameterization added to the end which is confusing the RSS reader as it tries to decide if the feed has been read already.

[tomcloyd]

Re: Kontact feedreader downloading multiple copies, repeatedly

versions:
KDE: 4.3.2
Kontact 4.3.2 (latest from Synaptic)

After not getting a response in this forum (until yours) I went to the forum at Bugzilla (hope I got that right) and was fairly quickly told this sounds like a bug, and was asked to file a report, which I'll do when I get a moment.

I just took the feed addresses that Feedzilla gave me - made no change of any kind. Here's one (with many dups): feedzilla.com/rss/health/psychiatry

Thanks for your thoughts.

[cowb0y]

Re: Kontact feedreader downloading multiple copies, repeatedly

FYI, the actual program which is doing the feed fetching/display is called Akregator. It runs in the context of the Kontact program, which integrates the various KDE-PIM programs (KMail, etc.). You can actually run Akregator on its own (say, from konsole) to see it as a stand-alone application. If, for example, it were crashing, I would suggest you do so to isolate its behavior, and see any error messages printed in the konsole window.

I added the feed you posted (feed urls actually start with http:// just like regular web pages (that's how the feed reader fetches them). It does indeed duplicate each entry every time I refresh the feed manually. So, I opened up Konqueror and placed the complete url (if you right-click on a feed "folder" in Akregator, the right-click menu will allow you to "Edit" the feed, which will show you the exact url the reader is fetching, etc.) in and loaded the page (try it and see). When I reloaded the page manually, I noticed that the feed IDs remain the same, but there is an image (<img...> tag) in each feed item which changes. My guess is that Akregator is seeing this and thinking that the item itself has been updated (or is a new item), so it's refetching it, which is obviously not correct behavior.

I would post this in the KDE bug tracker (if it's not there already). There are usually, for each project/application, one bug tracker for the program/project (ex., the KDE project) and also one for the distro (ex., Ubuntu). Sometimes its better to file the bug in one v. the other (or both). In this case, I would search both trackers to see if a similar bug report has already been made, then file a new one if not. Start with KDE, as it seems more like an upstream (application) bug than a packaging (distro)-type bug.

http://bugs.kde.org/
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/

Try to give as many specific details as possible, so people can evaluate/advise/recreate the bug if possible. Feel free to post any bug urls, etc. here if you have more questions.

Have fun!

[tomcloyd]

Re: Kontact feedreader downloading multiple copies, repeatedly

Thanks for the instruction in how to file a bug, as well as your account of how you investigated it. Very helpful to me at my present level of learning. I did understand that Kontact is only managing a host of other applications, but was going to file this as a Kontact bug and let others take it from there. Now, I'll point, in my bug report, to your forum post, which ought to speed up bug resolution (if it's not already filed...)

Thanks again for being so helpful.

t.

[cowb0y]

Re: Kontact feedreader downloading multiple copies, repeatedly

Sure thing. Just to mention that I corrected my misspelling of Akregator above. And thanks for contributing to the process of free software.