¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Until a few months ago, I had the following in my /etc/miniflux.conf:

[...]
# 3 years
FILTER_ENTRY_MAX_AGE_DAYS=1095
[...]

The intent is clear: every blog post older than 3 years would be automatically filtered out. Including when subscribing to new feeds.

This has worked reliably for ages, until it didn’t.

A few months ago, I kept seeing super old entries (many years old), all the time.

I thought it was related to this issue.

Today I had time to look deep into it and traced the pattern down to this snippet:

if key == "FILTER_ENTRY_MAX_AGE_DAYS" {
    slog.Warn("Configuration option FILTER_ENTRY_MAX_AGE_DAYS is deprecated; use user filter rule max-age:<duration> instead")
}

Aha!

Then what? As per the docs:

max-age:duration - Match entries that are not older than a specific duration (e.g., max-age:7d for 7 days). Valid time units are “ns”, “us” (or “µs”), “ms”, “s”, “m”, “h”, “d”.

As such, now I have the following in Settings > Global Feed Settings > Entry Blocking Rules¹:

EntryDate=max-age:730d

Old posts no more!