News: Setting Update Interval Manually

[feutl]

Read and tick the following checkbox after you have created the issue or place an x inside the brackets ;)

• [x] I have read the CONTRIBUTING.md and followed the provided tips

I am using the NC cron option which, per default, runs every 5 minutes. Some websites do not like to be queried every 5 minutes and therefor respond with a 429 Too Many Requests and rate limit the IP. This generates an error in the logs and the News app.

I would like to see an option to set a manual time interval, for example every second or third cron run the RSS feeds (or a specific RSS feed) get fetched and therefor updated.

I also know that I could just deactivate the system cron for the News App and use something else (as stated in the info text), but the most convenient option would be to extend the news settings with another parameter to overwrite the cron behavior as described above.

I also link some tickets which relate somehow but are not similar
Ajax Based updates - https://github.com/nextcloud/news/issues/569
Same problem but closed because staled - https://github.com/nextcloud/news/issues/520

[Grotax]

How about the news-updater? https://github.com/nextcloud/news-updater

[feutl]

Hmm, not very intuitive and simple. I would still prefer an option to just runt the news update with every third, fourth etc cron update.
I would even go as far, to define the default to be run on every 6th or 10th cron job.

@Grotax
Your option is powerful, but not something people can easily setup.

[Grotax]

Yea true it's not very simple. Will see if someone will pick this up, probably not easy to implement.

[therealrobster]

I came here to ask the same thing. I was checking my network activity and my news feeds are being refreshed too often. I really need some manual control over the interval. A couple times a day suites my needs. Others may need more. It needs to be easily adjustable.

Apart from that, loving the system. Thank you

[karroffel]

I like the idea of only running it every n-th cron update. The interface could allow you to enter hours as a regular number input and the minutes in steps of 5.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[therealrobster]

The bot (above my comment) has spoken. Does anyone feel we're going to be able to get some action on this? If not we can't and that's ok but as it is I'm getting TONNES of network traffic that I'd really rather not.

[feutl]

I can only agree with @therealrobster every 5 minutes is just too much. Especially with lots of feeds to crawl.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[therealrobster]

It's the race of beating this bot to keep the thread active. The inhumanity :-) So... My server is pinging news all day every day. Can we PLEASE have a switch to slow down the requests?

[feutl]

Same for me, more of my subscribed RSS feeds start limiting and denying access because of the excessive requests.
It was all good when I started with NC13 - there the cron was done every 15 minutes, now we are at 5 minutes which is way too much for the news feed fetching.

[SMillerDev]

Unless someone here wants to make this feature a reality by making a pull request it won't happen. Normal maintenance already barely happens.

[feutl]

@SMillerDev
I get your point, but why closing it than ?
Should this request not kept open for someone (whoever) in the future with time taking care. Is is it the way things do get handled for this project?

[SMillerDev]

In my experience people rarely go through a long list of issues to find something that may or may not be fixed yet. If nobody already participating here is going to add this feature, you'll have to wait until someone comes up with it as a fix for themselves.

[powerpaul17]

Yes, this is how it is handled here, the maintainers do not want anything like a feature request. Maybe we should fork it just to keep the issues around..

[SMillerDev]

I love feature requests, they're just not going to be implemented unless they're in the form of a pull request since this app isn't really maintained. Keeping issues open in case someone suddenly wants to resolve all open requests isn't going to help.

[powerpaul17]

No but it serves as a pool where ideas/issues get collected so that someone can know what people would like to have in a project. Also, issues do not resolve themselves just by closing them. But that's just my opinion of course.

[SMillerDev]

Also, issues do not resolve themselves just by closing them.

They don't, but when they also don't resolve by being open I prefer to close them.

[feutl]

should propose this behavior to all projects, the issue list would be much much smaller and the projects would evolve much much quicker to a state where they are feature complete :)

but ok, I noted this, and disagree to this behavior and your point of view on how to handle feature requests for projects.

but thanks

[feutl]

I know, old issue and closed but is this (https://github.com/nextcloud/news/tree/master/docs/updateInterval) actually the feature we were talking about ?
Or did I miss something, I even do not know when it was added, just realized after the python-updater got broken and wanted to switch back. If so, it would be great to know, so we have an issue closed with a proper reference :) for others searching.

Thanks

[Grotax]

It came as a feature when I investigated an error message that news would write to the log quite often.
In that research I discovered that the job framework we used was deprecated.

Nextcloud now offers you to register your jobs and will call them every X seconds depending on your request.

So I changed it to use that and made the seconds configurable in the admin settings.
The default being 1h, which hopefully reduced the ddos effect of news and popular feeds a tiny bit.

But the main target was to get rid of deprecated code.

[feutl]

@Grotax this is awesome :) could you add the release this was added to the ticket ? or the PR ? just for reference so everyone else stumbling over this to have a well documented issues and reference 👍

I just like this :) THANKS

[Grotax]

It was added with https://github.com/nextcloud/news/releases/tag/14.2.0