feed visibility lifecycle

Feed Visibility and Lifecycle

You will learn how to control feed visibility, what each lifecycle flag does, and how use roles affect health classification.

Visibility flags

hidden

Set hidden: true to remove a feed from public browsing. The feed remains:

• Visible in the admin UI with full status
• Active in the processing pipeline
• Scheduled normally

Hidden feeds are useful for provider databases, internal references, and feeds that enrich other feeds but should not appear in the public catalog.

sources:
  maxmind_geolite2_asn:
    hidden: true
    use: [asn]
    ...

disabled

Disabled feeds are not scheduled and not processed. Their enable markers are removed. Use the admin API or CLI to disable/enable feeds.

Disabling a feed that participates in a merge affects the merge composition. See Merge Feeds for safety rules.

Health-related flags

exclude_from_unmaintained

Set exclude_from_unmaintained: true to suppress age-based health states: delayed, risky, and unmaintained.

The feed can still receive empty, unavailable, and archived health states — this flag only affects age-based classification.

Use it for feeds with naturally slow update cadences that should not be flagged as stale.

sources:
  bogons:
    exclude_from_unmaintained: true
    use: [bogons]
    ...

Role-based health suppression

Feeds with these use: roles automatically suppress age-based health states:

• critical_infrastructure
• provider_context
• asn
• geoip

These feeds represent reference data, provider context, or enrichment databases. Their update cadence is naturally slow, and flagging them as "unmaintained" would be misleading.

This suppression uses the configured use: tags — not feed-name pattern matching.

The bogons role does not suppress age-based health. Bogon feeds are expected to update regularly.

Health states

State	Meaning
healthy	Feed updates within expected cadence
delayed	Feed is slower than the healthy cadence floor (age-based, suppressible)
risky	Feed is much slower than expected (age-based, suppressible)
unmaintained	Feed appears abandoned (age-based, suppressible)
empty	Feed body is empty (not suppressible)
unavailable	Feed consistently fails to download (not suppressible)
archived	Feed has been continuously unavailable beyond the archival threshold (not suppressible)

Archived feeds

Archived feeds have been unavailable for a long time (beyond feed_health_archival_threshold_minutes). They remain public catalog targets — their historical data and comparison artifacts persist — but raw downloads stop.

Archived additive inputs are excluded from merge composition automatically. Archived subtractive inputs fail the merge instead, because publishing without the configured exclusion would broaden the output.

Summary of what each flag controls

Flag	Public browsing	Admin UI	Processing	Age-based health	Merge eligibility
(none)	visible	visible	active	normal	eligible
hidden	hidden	visible	active	normal	eligible
disabled	—	visible	stopped	—	excluded
exclude_from_unmaintained	visible	visible	active	suppressed	eligible
archived	visible (stale)	visible	stopped	archived	additive excluded; subtractive blocks merge