Qwertee: incomplete feed display

[gereons]

I just added https://www.qwertee.com/rss to my NNW feeds, and it only displays 2 of the 6 entries. Other feed readers show all 6.

[brentsimmons]

This feed is NetNewsWire’s worst-case scenario! It‘s technically valid — see https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.qwertee.com%2Frss — but it’s awful.

Here’s the scoop:

NetNewsWire expects each item to have a guid — the guid is the unique identifier for each item. This way NetNewsWire can tell when an item is the same item across feed refreshes.

But this feed has no guids.

So… with no guid, as a backup, it looks at pubDate and link and combines those to create a unique ID. (I’m simplifying just a little.)

You might think it would look at title and description — but it doesn’t, because those things can and do change (they get edited).

But the pubDate and link hardly ever get edited — they’re pretty safe to rely on.

In the case of this feed, though, the link is always exactly the same for each item!

<link>https://www.qwertee.com</link>

So you’d figure that pubDate would probably be okay, right? When would multiple articles be published at the exact same second?

Well, in this feed, the pubDate is exactly the same for every single article in a day! For instance:

<pubDate>Fri, 07 Mar 2025 22:00:00 +0000</pubDate>

Because of this — because there are no guids, and because the link is always the same and the pubDate is the same for each day — NetNewsWire sees exactly one item per day. The feed currently has six items over two days, but because it’s just two days, NetNewsWire sees two items.

If this feed would just add guids, or use a different link for each item or a different pubDate for each item, then it would work fine. But it’s as if it were designed specifically to not work in NetNewsWire! (I know that’s not true, of course. It’s just a very weird case.)

[gereons]

OK, thanks for the explanation. Would it make sense to look at title and/or description just in this pathological case, then?

I've also sent a link to this issue to the qwertee folks, maybe they'll fix it on their end.