Information on How Feed Reader Manages Articles

This topic contains information on how Feed Reader retrieves and updates articles.

This page discusses:

Crawling Frequency

Feed Reader automatically checks for new articles by regularly reading the data of the RSS feed it was configured with. This is called crawling. The crawling frequency depends on the RSS feed popularity, activity, source, or rules.

Note: You cannot manually make Feed Reader widgets check for new articles.
RSS Feed Characteristics Crawling Frequency
Popular RSS feeds; that is, RSS feeds that are crawled by many Feed Reader widgets across the platform. Usually varies from every 10 minutes to every 4 hours. The more popular an RSS feed, the more often it is crawled.
Active RSS feeds; that is, the RSS feeds that publish the highest number of articles. Usually varies from every 10 minutes to every 4 hours. The more active an RSS feed, the more often it is crawled.
Inactive RSS feeds; that is, RSS feeds that have not published any new articles in a very long time. Varies from a few times a day to a few times a week.
RSS feeds in error. Varies from a few times a day to a few times a week.
3DSwym RSS feeds. Not supported.

Limitations

Some RSS feeds limit the number of times they can be crawled over a certain period of time. In this case, Feed Reader automatically adjusts its crawling frequency to abide by the RSS feed rules.

An RSS feed can forbid Feed Reader from crawling it at any time. In this case, Feed Reader displays an error message to inform you and never tries to crawl this RSS feed ever again.

Content Updates

When an RSS feed updates the content of an article that Feed Reader has already retrieved, one of the following happens:

  • When the RSS feed provides <guid> elements, Feed Reader can identify the articles it has already retrieved. Because Feed Reader does not crawl the other elements of an article it has already retrieved, Feed Reader does not know that the article content was updated. This means that updates are not reflected in the widget.
  • When the RSS feed does not provide a <guid> element for an article, or when it updates the article's <guid> element, Feed Reader cannot know if it has already retrieved this article. In this case, Feed Reader crawls all the elements of the article and considers the article as new. This means that Feed Reader displays updated articles multiple times: There is one occurrence of the article as it was when Feed Reader first retrieved it, and one occurrence per update.