How to prevent a page show up multiple times in a RSS feed?

[JP Cornelissen]

I have created an RSS feed by using the Confluence feed builder (based on favorits, limit to 10 items and within the last 5 days). Now I often get the same page showing up multiple times in my feed. They even show the same author and date+time stamp.

For example, on 23 January in the morning, I edited a page myself. On 24 january when arriving in the office this page is listed in my feed 4 times!

Is this a wrong feed configuration or an issue with the Confluence RSS feed?

Thanks

[Jim Wahl · Accepted solution]

My main concern was Google, which does see the change (after an hour or so) and updates its global cache with the new content. Again, if the <id> matches an existing entry <id>, the existing entry is updated. If the <id> is new (or versioned), a new entry is created.

Therefore, by not versioning the <id> tag, you prevent duplicate entries. With Google, end users will get the new content once they refresh the feed. However, the edited post will still be marked as read if they've viewed it previously.

I also experimented with Outlook, which does not appear to update the feed content after an edit. But if the <id> tag is versioned you get duplicate entries, same as Google.

Hope this helps you---let me know if I haven't explained it well or if you'd like me to test something.

[Jim Wahl]

Just a last update on this. My particular issue (duplicate entries in Google Reader after each blog edit/update) was caused by the atom <id> tag being versioned after an edit.

This is a big problem for users of Google Reader, since Google caches the feed and you cannot clear this cache. Therefore, if you edit a blog post five times (and Google scans the feed between those updates), everyone using Google Reader will get five copies of the post. (!)

I ended up making a minor change in the source code for DefaultFeedBuilder.java to remove the version. See additional comments in CONF-8589

Before:

<id>tag:www.myurl.com,2009:blogpost-3047472-2</id>

After:

<id>tag:www.myurl.com,2009:blogpost-3047472</id>

[Jim Wahl]

Looks like there are a couple of open issues / feature requests that may address this:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-16006

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-10715

The latter has been open since 2008. ... Please check them out and vote for fixes.

[JP Cornelissen]

Does this mean a post doesn't show up anymore at all after you edit a post? Considering there is no versioning, so the reader doesn't see the change?

[JP Cornelissen]

I think that are two different issues/request. I voted on 16006 though.

The following are more applicable:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-12910

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-8589

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-18633

[JP Cornelissen]

Hello Jim, unfortunately no solution yet...

[Jim Wahl]

JP,

Did you ever figure this out?

I may be having the same issue, which is that every time I edit a blog post, the post's <guid tag in the atom feed changes, becuase it's based on the pageid and not on the page URL.

Most blog readers, like Google Reader, will retrieve and permanently store each unique <guid> post.

I would love to hear people's thoughts on a solution? Is there a way to edit a page without changing the pageid? Can the RSS feed <guid> be configured to use the URL?

Help!

Jim