News: Cannot remove defunct rss feed

[the-rocinante]

Explain the Problem

When an RSS feed is added which has become defunct (producing a 404 server response code for instance), then it cannot be removed. Nor in fact can any feed be, though it's particularly problematic in the case of a broken/defunct/mistyped feed.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Add a feed to the news app which points to a missing page
2. Watch errors appear in the nextcloud user interface
3. Bang your head against the wall unsuccessfully trying to remove the broken feed url
   3.1. Hope you don't ultimately irreparably break your news app or entire nextcloud install in the process

System Information

• Nextcloud version: 21.0.0
• System cron (functioning without errors)

[SMillerDev]

Does "delete feed" not work in this scenario?

[the-rocinante]

No. The menu for that feed was inaccessible.

I didn't see any such option in the feeds list either. The only plausible option I saw was to delete the folder in which the feed had been placed, along with all the other feeds it contained presumably. However apparently removing the folder does not actually delete the folder nor the feeds, but merely toggles a column in the database. Consequently when I tried to readd the folder or any of the other working feeds it contained, I got errors stating the feeds already exist, in spite of now being completely inaccessible.

Sadly, after some frustration with doing this repeatedly, and disabling then uninstalling the app several times to no effect, I noticed the tables in the database remained after the app was uninstalled (not merely disabled). First I thought I could toggle the deleted values of the feeds I wanted to keep, but this did nothing. Then I did the same for the folder they were in, which in spite of being readded, was still marked as deleted. This also did nothing. Then I thought, maybe I can just remove the rows for the folder and feeds in question. This did not fix the problem. So finally, I deleted the tables themselves after uninstalling the news app yet again. Now it's completely broken and I can't even reinstall it, because apparently the schema is preinstalled with nextcloud rather than when the app is downloaded and installed via the interface.

Sadly I mistakenly presumed that when an app is disabled and removed, that it's data should be too (because privacy), but I was wrong, and stupidly didn't think to make a backup of the schema before doing it. So, I can't even try whatever you might suggest at this point until I can get another copy of nextcloud setup and dump it's default schema for the missing tables in question (presuming that will help whatsoever).

[SMillerDev]

It doesn't actually ship with nextcloud. Nextcloud thinks it already created them. You can delete the items for news from oc_migrations and when you install the app again it should recreate it's schema.

[SMillerDev]

In addition, you might just want to try listing and deleting misbehaving feeds using the ./occ news:* commands since almost everything from web is also implemented in the cli.

[the-rocinante]

Well that was a lifesaver. Thanks for the tip. You saved me hours of further pain trying to figure it out on my own. I'm new to nextcloud, and still having a bit of a learning curve to admin the instance efficiently.

[the-rocinante]

So that solved my immediate issue, but I think it might still be worth investigating how this can be resolved more smoothly for other users down the road.

[Grotax]

Do you have an example feed?
A link that leads to 404 is not producing this error. My guess is the self link of a feed is pointing to 404?

[the-rocinante]

This was the link in question. https://www.sciencenews.org/feeds/headlines.rss
It was from an old list of rss feeds I had previously subscribed to, but hadn't checked on in a while.

[the-rocinante]

From a UX standpoint, if a feed returns a final response code which is not 200 et al, or has malformed xml, the app should alert the user and automatically refrain from adding it to the feeds list.

[Grotax]

Hmm okay, so the feed needs to go bad while it's already added.
The UI is currently not in active development for a couple of years, so I don't think we can improve this at the moment.

[the-rocinante]

No. I don't think that's the case. I had just added it. What I mean is that I had a list of rss feeds in a text file which I was adding one at a time, and I hadn't checked first whether each of those urls were still valid before I tried pasting them into the News app.

[Grotax]

But I can't reproduce your issue, I don't get the same behaviour just a notification telling me to check the logs.

[the-rocinante]

I just reproduced it again (at the risk of having to repeat this whole exercise again). Same result. I get that notification to check the logs, but I'm still unable to remove the feed from the folder I placed it in.

Perhaps the error is with my original description, since I was trying to recall details after hours of frustration of trying various ways of removing the link, and probably didn't describe what occurred as accurately as I should have.

[Grotax]

Oh okay the behavior is different when you add the feed to a folder, the feed is there with a spinner (loading animation) and the url of the feed. There is no way to remove it, but it's not added to the DB it just hangs there in the UI.

With a refresh of the site the feed disappears though, so it's not stuck for forever.

As the current UI is not maintained and the new one, if it ever gets finished, is based on a completely different technology, it doesn't make sense to keep this issue open.