Questions regarding max-items

[Nikolas]

Hello,

I have syncing enabled with Miniflux.

can someone help me understand the max-items option?

When I for example set it to 100, it does load the newest 100 entries of that feed that are loaded in Miniflux, right?

If I set all 100 entries to "read", it does sync them back to Miniflux, which works fine.

But it does not load older unread entries from that feed so they stay unread in Miniflux.

Is that how it works?

Otherwise, if I do not set "read" status on the 100 loaded entries and wait until a new entry appears on the feed, it would swap out the oldest entry and replace it with this new one?

I am just curious if my assumption is right (:

Thanks in advance!

[Alexander Batischev]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Hi, and sorry for the delayed reply!

On Fri, Nov 07, 2025 at 02:18:11AM -0800, Nikolas wrote:
>When I for example set it to 100, it does load the newest 100 entries
>of
>that feed that are loaded in Miniflux, right?
>If I set all 100 entries to "read", it does sync them back to Miniflux,
>which works fine.
>But it does not load older unread entries from that feed so they stay
>unread in Miniflux.
>Is that how it works?

Yep, that sounds right.

>Otherwise, if I do not set "read" status on the 100 loaded entries and wait
>until a new entry appears on the feed, it would swap out the oldest entry
>and replace it with this new one?

Almost. In fact, the oldest *unflagged* entry will be swapped out, and
then the new entry will be added.

Now that I look at the code, apparently there are some holes in here.
First of all, `max-items` is applied both when writing to the database
and reading from it. When writing, we apparently don't apply any
pre-defined sorting, so it's unknown what items will get dropped — could
be oldest, could be newest, could be first one alphabetically etc. This
seems wrong. I made a note to look further into this when I have time.

Second, if there are more than `max-items` flagged items, no new items
can be added. On the one hand this works as specified, but on the other
hand it's impossible to tell if there are new items that *could* be
added. Feels like we could improve this, but I don't yet see how.

- --
Regards,
Alexander Batischev

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Fingerprint: CE6C 4307 9348 58E3 FD94 A00F 3569 61A2 0C8B FD03

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[Nikolas]

Hey, thanks for taking your time to investigate.

I wondered because sometimes in Newsboat my feed was empty while Miniflux still had unread items that were a few days old.

Yes, intuitively I would say the Newsboat feed should act like a conveyer belt when I do not flag any items as read. New items enter at the front and old ones leave my feed "at the back".

Happy new year in advance!