ipodderx-rs/TODO.md

To do

Errors in the log

From the production log and the feeds' stored errors on 2026-09-13. The Docker log only reached back to 12:32 UTC, so the list comes from feeds.last_error: 57 of 1,059 feeds. None of it is ipx's User-Agent; a browser gets the same answers.

• Stop scanning an OPML's feeds once nobody subscribes to it. 55 of the 57 are feeds from davewiner (lists.opml.org/davefeeds.xml). The list left config.toml about 14 hours before this was written, but its 922 feeds are still in the database and still scanned every hour, with auto-download on: subscriptions() adds every derived feed, and with no parent to copy from, auto_download falls back to true (src/main.rs:937). docs/users.md says a feed stops being scanned when its last subscriber leaves. Skip a derived feed whose parent is not in config, and when the last subscriber leaves an OPML, treat its feeds the way sync_group treats ones the list dropped: remove those with nothing downloaded, mark the rest orphaned. remove_feed and ipx rm both leave them behind today. (src/main.rs, src/web.rs)
• Read feeds with a bare &. kcpw has <link>https://kcpw.org/?post_type=post&p=125715</link>, and both feedland feeds have the same fault. Strict XML refuses them; browsers and other readers do not. When feed::parse fails, try once more with every & that does not start an entity written as &. Nobody subscribes to these three now, but the next feed like them will fail the same way. (src/feed.rs)
• Say what came back when it is not a feed. Thirteen errors read "not RSS (the input did not begin with an rss tag) and not Atom (...)". Each one checked was a web page: the feed moved and its old URL redirects to the site, or the domain lapsed. Say "got a web page, not a feed", and when the page links a feed (<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml">), name it. That link found the new feed for om.co, ms.now, Letters of Note, the Daily Dot, Hell Gate, The Frame Lab and Daily Kos. A 202 with an empty body (British Antarctic Survey) should read as "nothing yet", not as a parse failure. (src/feed.rs)
• Show a publisher's error in the UI. Today a failing feed shows its raw error in red only once you open it (web/index.html:877, :960); the OPML view marks a failing child "error" (:988), and the sidebar shows nothing. Mark a failing feed in the sidebar too, and say whose problem it is and what to do, in plain words: a 404 means the publisher took the feed down or moved it, 401 and 403 that the site refuses ipx, 402 that the feed needs a paid plan, a name that no longer resolves that the site is gone, and a web page instead of a feed that it moved (with the new URL when the page links one). Offer Unsubscribe, or Use the new address. Keep timeouts, 5xx and 429 out of it, and flag a feed only once it has failed for a day: macmanx failed once and read fine an hour later. That needs the time a feed started failing, kept beside last_error and cleared when a check succeeds. (web/index.html, src/db.rs, src/main.rs)
• Westenberg. The only failing feed anyone subscribes to. The Hacker News stars list still gives joanwestenberg.com/rss, which is a 404; the feed is now joanwestenberg.com/feed. Nothing for ipx to fix; subscribe to the new URL directly.

The rest are the publishers' doing: 404 (24 feeds), 403 from sites that refuse anything but a browser (5), no longer resolving or connecting (7), and one each of 400 (an invite-only Substack), 401 (a site gone private) and 402 (an expired rss.app trial). Once the first item lands, all of them but Westenberg stop being scanned.

After these: cargo test, node tests/page-smoke.js, npx playwright test.