RSS Guard: vanhemmat versiot ja versiohistoria

Dear users. This is (probably) the last release from 4.x line of RSS Guard.
I had a looong thinking about current state of RSS Guard. You see, when I was starting the whole project, I wanted it to be reliable, relatively fast, stable, simple-to-use but with advanced features, maintainable. Somehow, we got lost in the process. RSS Guard relies on the number of external libraries, mainly Qt ones like QtWebEngine, QtWidgets, QtNetwork, but also SQLite, MariaDB etc.
Every long-standing bug in any of these impacts RSS Guard as well. RSS Guard is obese and too big. It tries to do too many things and arguably does not do some of them too well.
So I made some decisions and started working on new main line of RSS Guard. It will have initial version 5.0.0. Main note for all users of RSS Guard is that all your 4.8.x data will be compatible with it, so if you will want to switch to RSS Guard 5.0.0 when it comes out, you can (you will just need to copy your files over).
Now, let me outline major things that will change (and yes, some of you might be sad, but that is just how it is):
- complete removal of all web-browsing capabilities
- complete removal of some major external dependencies like NodeJS
- removal of AdBlock
- removal of internal download manager
- removal of many other smaller things which are not directly related to "feed reader" features
Big chunk of RSS Guard source code is (or will be) removed and that allowed me to make source code base more maintainable. Note that some dropped features will actually be replaced and should be more working than before. I plan to add compiled version of module which would be able to automagically fetch full articles for each feed - this is currently solved by NodeJS-powered addon which is honestly painful to setup.
Also, all builtin skins will be removed and new default skin is being implemented. It will be simpler, visually neutral and should just work.
I already made like 150 commits of work and there are several months at best before the 5.0.0 comes out. You can see that in default "master" branch of RSS Guard source code base. Also, note that I will go through entire list of reported issues and will remove all which request something related to remove code and also all issues which request features which I cannot realistically implement and/or are feasible or whatever. Note that if anyone wants to contribute in any way, pull requests are welcomed for sure.
There are people who regularly contribute and some of them do actually amazing work. Big thanks to them.
https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/commits/master/
https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/milestone/39
Added:
- Ability to turn off/on font anti-aliasing for the whole app. (#1691)
Fixed:
- Random QThread-related crashes. (#1654)
- Article list/viewer behavior when feeds with very long descriptions are selected. (#1755)

Added:
- All dropdown filters (for both feed and article lists) can now be assigned to keyboard shortcuts.
- "Add account" dialog was bit updated.
Fixed:
- Fixed unwanted "feed error" dialog, now properly configurable.
- Fixed text-based filtering for feed list (sorry).
- Dropdown feed list filtering now properly filters out categories and labels too.
- Selected item behavior when filtering is enabled was refined.

Users, this is one of the last RSS Guard releases from 4.x line. There might be more releases from 4.x but only bug-fixing ones.
I will start working on new RSS Guard which will have many differences from current one and will aim to return to original goals of the application:
- simplicity
- good features
- speed
- stability
Some features will be removed and while some of you will likely not be that happy, note that all this will help to keep RSS Guard development going in the future, ensuring we have maintainable, solid, expandable application. The development of RSS Guard is hugely understaffed. It is basically one-man project with some help of individual contributors.
Fill this survey, please: https://forms.gle/3CZm95W6vrBLfi5K9
Added:
- Notification when feed fetch fails was added. (#1698)
- Application can now start in minimized state even without tray icon being enabled. (#1713)
- Columns in feed list are now resizeable. (2ed50e5)
- Feed list now also offers filtering dropdown toolbar button. This allows easy filtering of feed list the same way as article list already does. (542ae73)
- User can now explicitly disable showing of modal dialogs depending on notification type. (83fed6b)
- Added option to manually reload active skin without restarting the app. (01bc5a7)
- Unread article dot color is now taken from active skin. (c68e545)
Fixed:
- HTML formatting was kind of broken for some specific feeds including bracket symbols. (#1692)
- AdBlock was not sometimes working. (#1702)
- Fix blank window upstream bug when doing specific stuff with tray icon. (#1672)
- Export folder for database/configuration files is properly remembered. (#1667)
- More forgiving OPML parsing. (#1688, #1719)
- Clear eTag headers when feed is purged. (2e9d26e)
- OpenSSL Qt plugin is properly copied. (c3911bd)

Added:
- Application is now "self-signed" on Mac OS X. (#1679)
Fixed:
- Missing icons in some use-cases. (#1683)

Added:
- Added feed fetching throttle control: (#1154, #1322)
- Too many requests HTTP codes are now recognized and respected by RSS Guard.
- There is new per-account setting Feed fetch spacing which performs intelligent delaying of subsequent feed fetching from identical remote hosts, trying to avoid aforementioned errors/bans for making too many network requests in short time windows. The setting should be set to value low enough to avoid those kind of errors but still having good UX.
- Custom color option for disabled feeds. (#1652)
- Strikethrough for disabled feeds is optional. (#1651)
- Ability to fetch feed icon from user entered URL. (#1645)
- Application now remembers last used folder from any of its open/save file dialogs. (#1643)
- HTTP/2 is now switchable on a per feed basis. (#1615)
- Now duplicate keyboard shortcuts cannot be assigned. (#1605)
- New option for colored/monochrome icons for tray icon. (#1603)
- Article list filtering options are now persisting. (#1590)
- Official binaries now use Qt 6.8.3.
Fixed:
- Enhanced QSS for tooltips for better readability. (#1637)
- RSS feed encoding detection was prone to errors. (#1664)
- Localization page now displays correctly. (#1611)
- MariaDB backend now uses MEDIUMTEXT column to allow bigger articles.
Removed:
- Built-in Google API OAuth credentials are now REMOVED from official RSS Guard binaries. There are several reasons for this, including the fact that these credentials had low usage quotas, therefore were not suitable for bigger number of users. So now each user has to obtain his own client ID/SECRET from Google Cloud Platform (which is free for personal usage).

Added:
- Working threads for fetching feeds now have their priority lowered to "low". This will likely lead to better GUI responsiveness during feed fetching with minimal to no performance loss. (#1497)
- User-agent now can be set from settings. (#1471)
Fixed:
- JavaScript alerts are now shown in a better way.
- Removed some debugging code. (#1506)
- Node.js settings section "Browse" buttons now work correctly. (#1483)
- Article filters now should not be assigned twice (or more) via GUI. (#1503)
- Crash in built-in file downloader should be fixed. (#1495, potentially #1485 and #1487)
- Fix wrong SQL code. (#1489)
- Toast notifications are now disabled on Linux/Wayland because Wayland does not support these. (#1494)
- Fix some monitor-related bugs by updating Qt to newer version. (#1479)
- Tweaked <img> extraction. (#1477)
- Added more supported date/time formats. (#1478)
- Langs updated.

Added:
- Localizations updated.
- Mac OS 13 is now used to build Mac RSS Guard version.
- Added Reddit plugin. At this point, this is WIP (!). The plugin will be eventually greatly enhanced in the future, but no ETA. Currently the plugin can do:
- OAuth authentication.
- Loads list of subscribed subreddits.
- Loads list of newest topics from each subreddit.
Fixed:
- Plugin libraries are now loaded more properly, specifically they should not be loaded more than once.
- Time.com feeds were not properly rendered. (#1450)
- Drag and drop operations were fixed, although there are some cases where you have to adjust the process, for example when dragging an item "after" the last item in top level.

Fixed:
- Some non-lite installation packages were wrongly named. (#1426)
- Plugins were loaded multiple times. (#1427)

OK, this is mainly bug-fix release. In the close future (months), expect only bug-fixing releases. Again, we need to make RSS Guard rock stable.
Added:
- Nothing really.
Fixed:
- Fixed detection of plugins which was broken due to wrong plugin search path. (#1416, #1420)
- If "Show unread only" article list filter is active and you select article (which then gets marked read) and then feed is fetched, currently selected article does not suddenly disappear from the list. (#1415)
- Selected "style" was disappearing from settings dialog even thought it was correctly saved into settings. (#1408)
- Right-clicking article selects it (and displays its contents) but does not modify read/unread state. This behavior was corrupted in previous release, therefore we just return to old good behavior. (#1410)
- XML parser now allows leading and trailing blank lines when loading XML of feeds. (#1403)
- Date/time parsing was further enhanced, although there are some connected issues which will be hunted in the future.
- Qt5/Windows builds will use only qtmultimedia media player backend because libmpv dropped Windows 7 support.
- Fixed "About" dialog RSS Guard information formatting.

OK, dear users. Over recent releases, many features were added and as you can see RSS Guard bug tracker is full of (semi) bug reports which need to be addressed. Therefore I must declare feature-freeze for at least three upcoming releases. No new features will be added in forthcoming future, because RSS Guard codebase must be de-bugged and stabilized first. I will keep my word this time and no feature requests will be implemented.
Sole focus will be on fixing bugs and polish existing features and clean codebase. The other reason for this is also that lately my free time had become much much more limited for many reasons - family, other hobbies, work around house etc.
Added:
- Full article content can now be fetched with a single button. Button is placed in article viewer toolbar right next to "Reader mode" button. This feature (just as "reader mode" feature) requires Node.js installation. The feature works both for articles and for regular websites opened in embedded web browser.
- Article now can be marked (upon selection) as read with delay or only manually. (#1017)
- All RSS Guard plugins/services are now placed in their own library (DLL/SO/DYLIB) files and are loaded by main RSS Guard library dynamically. This means that unused services can now be removed from RSS Guard installation if not used by the user. Also it allows for a cleaner and slimmer common codebase. Refactoring of main RSS Guard library was also done and it is now more usable as regular dynamic-link library. I expect some regressions as this was HUGE change. Also, this change allows new potential interested people in writing new plugins easier as they now can just copy one of existing plugins and tweak for new service. Also this change now propagates to RSS Guard installer which allows you to only install plugins/services you want.
- Application (Qt) style and icon theme now can be properly set to respect system style/icons and this setting is dynamic, meaning if you change system theme and restart RSS Guard, new theme is honored. (#1352)
- Button to copy system/app information to "About..." dialog. (#1318)
- All modal dialogs now remember their sizes forever. (#1336)
Fixed:
- Removed debugging forgotten code. (#1354)
- "Cleanup" button in downloader was greyed out when it should not be. (#1350)
- App crashes when changing notification sound. (#1317)
- Built-in user-agent was updated. You can also supply your own user-agent, see rssguard.exe --help for more info.

Some fixes in this release.