Coordinated Universal Time not supported

[luca76]

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Explain the Problem

The Microsoft Visual Studio blog uses Coordinated Universal Time, not supported in news.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Import this feed: https://code.visualstudio.com/feed.xml
2. An error occurs.

[anoymouserver]

According to https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcode.visualstudio.com%2Ffeed.xml the used dateformat is not valid for atom feeds.

[chrbayer]

Even if the date is not valid, it would be better to work around this problem than to simply raise an exception and do nothing at all. The problem of the feed has been reported to MS, but since most of the reader can deal with this, it seems to be not corrected by them (see microsoft/vscode-docs#4225)

Some other readers deal with an invalid date by falling back to current current date:

liferea.x86_64 : <updated> fallback to blank : ""
quiterss.x86_64 : <updated> fallback to current date
feedreader.x86_64 : <updated> fallback to current date
gnome-feeds.noarch : <updated> fallback to current date
newsboat.x86_64 : <updated> fallback to current date

I think this would be a good solution for nextcloud news, too.

[SMillerDev]

While that's disappointing for them, I don't get anything for my work on news so I won't be introducing things that I think would be bad for maintenance. In the end news only needs the maintainers as user to be useful to someone, additional users are optional.

[alexdebril]

Even Microsoft, I didn't see that coming ...

I had a look at the feed and I think it's possible to find an "elegant "solution by adding a new entry in the special formats list. I'll give it a try in the next few days and keep you informed.

[powerpaul17]

While that's disappointing for them, I don't get anything for my work on news so I won't be introducing things that I think would be bad for maintenance. In the end news only needs the maintainers as user to be useful to someone, additional users are optional.

Nextcloud was not created by a few people only for themselves. It was created to be useful to many others (who should not have to be or become programmers or maintainers of the software). Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you in terms of standards or code maintenance but most users are ignorant to that, they just want it to work and if it doesn't, they will just use something else. And probably tell their friends that "Nextcloud" is shit and doesn't work as well as Google/Dropbox, etc. So in the end in my opinion sometimes it's better to "fix" something for users to provide them with better UX than to blame others for their mistakes (even if it is truly theirs). But anyway, back to work.. 😉

[SMillerDev]

Nextcloud was not created by a few people only for themselves. It was created to be useful to many others (who should not have to be or become programmers or maintainers of the software).

And the main Nextcloud maintainers get paid for that distinction.

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you in terms of standards or code maintenance but most users are ignorant to that, they just want it to work and if it doesn't, they will just use something else. And probably tell their friends that "Nextcloud" is shit and doesn't work as well as Google/Dropbox, etc. So in the end in my opinion sometimes it's better to "fix" something for users to provide them with better UX than to blame others for their mistakes (even if it is truly theirs). But anyway, back to work.. wink

If people pay me to work on this full time I'll prioritize users. As long as nobody pays me at all I'll prioritize my own sanity. In the end it matters very little to me what the public opinion of Nextcloud is. It matters to me that I have fun in my hobbies and that I can use an app that works at least for me.

[Grotax]

I support what the two main developers of this app already said.

I also get your point and we try to make news user-friendly whenever it is possible but especially the area of feeds is very difficult and as it was already said we can't catch every single issue, feed-io does already a lot of this.

And if some users decide to go somewhere else and use another tool or service I'm fine with that, we don't have the mission to convince everyone to use Nextcloud. We offer an app for a problem and invest a lot of our free time into maintaining it, that doesn't mean that we need to fix every issue.