Sort by "oldest first" doesn't always "work"

[firewyre]

I would expect "oldest first" to return items in the exact opposite order of "newest first", but this doesn't always seem to be the case. Sometimes, items from today are shown first, from oldest to newest, then all articles from before today are shown oldest to newest. Here's a screenshot demonstrating this behavior.


http://i.imgur.com/pgO5Pib.png

Perhaps this is expected for some reason, but I'm finding it confusing and the entries from today get in the way when you want to process oldest articles first.

Even more strangely, this seems to only happen with some of my feeds, differing even among feeds from the same website! I'm on v. 1.11.

[fox]

Maybe you should consider posting some of the problematic feeds, then. That is unless someone here has sufficient divination skills and is willing to step up.

[firewyre]

Being that you develop this software, I (mistakenly?) assumed you'd have some feeds that you've been subscribed to for a long time that might have this behavior (given how often I'm seeing it). Maybe you checked them to see, maybe you didn't; it's hard to tell from your reply. But either way, since I care about your software enough to bother reporting this bug to you I'll be happy to do the leg work for you, since it seems you have absolutely no interest in doing so yourself.

The feeds in question have an API key embedded in them, so I can't give them to you directly as samples... it will take some exploring to find other examples I can share. I will return to post what I come up with.

I hope you won't ban me for this reply... we've had productive threads before, and I'm just being as blunt as you were.

[firewyre]

Didn't take long actually. This isn't exactly what I first described, but it's still a mis-ordering of items seen when viewing unread, oldest first. An item from Jan 26th shows up between two items from Jan 27, and two Jan 27 items show up after many Jan 28th items.

Feed URL: http://www.lifehack.org/feed
Screenshot:


http://i.imgur.com/jtHJe0t.png

[linoth]

My, we seem to be having a wave of angry people demanding support lately. I'll chime in to confirm there's at least one bug, then hastily retreat.

I've noticed that Oldest First sorting didn't work quite right, but couldn't be assed to track down what might be causing it. I didn't want to raise a flag without at least a starting point. For me, it seemed to happen when I was viewing a folder, with the feeds being sorted by time, but grouped together by feed. In this case, a folder isn't involved, so that isn't the culprit.

If I notice the issue in the near future, I'll try to investigate a little further so that you have some usable details.

[ibreakcellphones]

One thing I've seen in my sorting adventures is that the date that is sorted on seems to be the date when the article was put into the TT-RSS database, not the publication date.

[linoth]

I was actually just looking at that, since it seemed like a likely culprit to sort by last update, but display the publication date, and I think you may be right.

This came from a category view, but the output for one particular snag I hit is...

Code: Select all

+---------------------+---------------------+---------------------+
| updated             | date_entered        | date_updated        |
+---------------------+---------------------+---------------------+
| 2014-03-23 18:55:03 | 2014-03-23 19:16:00 | 2014-03-25 08:09:11 |
| 2014-03-23 13:52:06 | 2014-03-23 21:16:00 | 2014-03-26 22:11:36 |
| 2014-03-23 19:16:31 | 2014-03-23 21:16:00 | 2014-03-26 00:38:40 |
+---------------------+---------------------+---------------------+

The times displayed (EDT) are 14:55, 9:52, and 15:16, so if I had to guess, the sort is based on date_entered, but we're seeing updated.

Edit: Failed to close a tag.

[firewyre]

@linoth - honestly, I'm neither angry nor demanding support. I just wanted to report the information I had, what happens as a result is ultimately out of my hands.

Thank you guys for the quick response and for the additional info.

[firewyre]

My DB confirms this. The Jan 26th entry that was out of place shows up in the same place if I sort as you suggest (subtract 5 hours from updated to account for my timezone and you get the date shown in tt-rss):


http://i.imgur.com/wcRTvPt.png

[JustAMacUser]

I'm pretty sure the logic behind sorting by the date added to the tt-rss database is that tt-rss can't control the date/time stamp site operators use for individual articles. They could publish a post five weeks in the past and it might then go unnoticed in tt-rss. By sorting by the date added to the database, the article will show up near the top.

[firewyre]

@JustAMacUser - I think that makes absolute sense in "newest first" mode, where you'd want to see it up top if it was just added regardless of what the site says the published date was, but not for "oldest first" (to your point, it was just published, so shouldn't it be at the end of the "oldest first" list?).

[fox]

Being that you develop this software, I (mistakenly?) assumed you'd have some feeds that you've been subscribed to for a long time that might have this behavior (given how often I'm seeing it). Maybe you checked them to see, maybe you didn't; it's hard to tell from your reply. But either way, since I care about your software enough to bother reporting this bug to you I'll be happy to do the leg work for you, since it seems you have absolutely no interest in doing so yourself.

This post is brilliant in every possible way.

[firewyre]

I thought you might get a chuckle out of that (or want to kill me :-p).

Any chance of a change being made here? I'm going to patch the query locally if not, so it would be cool to know.