Mishandling of feed when feed cannot be fetched
The website for one of the feeds I follow seems to currently be offline, resulting in the following error message:
The URL currently returns this page with HTTP status code 522, which understandably Feeds isn't going to parse properly.
There are three issues here:
- The error message is wrong. The URL is definitely a URL. Feeds may be unable to fetch it but there is nothing wrong with the URL itself, making this a misleading and quite confusing error message.
- It should not immediately suggest removal, especially as the default action, for a transient error. No web server has 100% availability, and Feeds should be able to handle temporary unavailability gracefully.
- The feed has disappeared both from the list of feeds and from the "Message Feeds" popup, making it impossible to actually fix a potential error. It even disappeared from the OPML export. For all intents and purposes, Feeds has already removed it. This should not happen without explicit user action.
All in all, this is quite aggressive behaviour for a failure to fetch. People are guaranteed to accidentally remove feeds due to this, which really should not happen.
Edit: The feed is back online, and there's a fourth issue: it seems to have forgotten which items I have already read and marked them all as unread.
Edited by L. K. Post