5.0.1

PLEASE, read the text below!

Survey: https://forms.gle/1dCgqi2p1TEGn73d8

This release contains some nice fixes and little enhancements from previous version. Thanks for your patience.

For users with dark desktop themes -> make sure to switch to minimal-dark skin in your RSS Guard settings. This skin is specifically tailored for users who use dark desktop themes.

As for the discussion around now-removed QtWebEngine and web browsing capabilities. There is argument that RSS Guard now cannot display "full" articles. Wrong. There is a setting in Experimental section of feed details dialog which can enable fetching full articles, even optionally in plain text format. Also, see below as this feature was even enhanced in this latest app version. I do not plan re-introducing web browsing capabilities because there are technical and (mainly) security implications which I want to avoid at all costs. RSS Guard provides ways to read full articles and if anyone wants to go to source website, just click the link and use the website in dedicated web browser which provides you with right tools to elevate your security in the online environment.

Added:

• All text is selected when focusing search textbox. (#2061)
• Filtering of feed list now takes much more feed data into account like URL, description, etc. (#2059)
• External tools can be made default for multiple domains. Just separate them with ',' (no spaces). (#2057)
• Added menu item "Fetch full contents" which can be triggered from main menu, article list context menu or article preview. This function downloads full contents of the article from its URL and stores it into the DB so that you can read the full article later. This feature should work for majority of websites, but will not work on websites which are behind anti-DDoS protections or heavy cookie-fied. (#2055)
• You now can drag URLs from article HTML preview to outside of RSS Guard. (#2032)

Fixed:

• Quick note for #2044. If you use dark desktop environment scheme, then again, use minimal-dark skin, please. This one is specifically tailored for dark environments. I added a tweak to make minimal-dark (and Breeze Dark) default skin for users with dark desktop themes. This only applies when RSS Guard is started with clean config and also is supported only on some platforms.
• Article automatic limit/control and article custom IDs are now also migrated from RSS Guard 4.x. (#2042)
• All menu items can be now properly assigned to shortcuts and added to toolbars. (#2040)
• Fix the bug in loading article pictures when going offline/online and vice versa. (#2033)

5.0.0

This is the first release of the brand-new 5.x RSS Guard line. Database files from the RSS Guard 4.x line are NOT compatible with this release because a massive overhaul of the database layer was performed. The database layer is now significantly more powerful, more maintainable, and in many cases, much faster.

Changes, improvements and fixes were done across the entire RSS Guard codebase with hundreds and hundreds of commits. Nearly every single source code file was touched. 50+ tickets were solved.

https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/milestone/39?closed=1

Also, make sure to go through the documentation, which has been revised and refreshed.

https://rssguard.readthedocs.io/en/stable

Donations are also very much welcomed, see more on the link below.

https://rssguard.readthedocs.io/en/stable/donations.html

Many features which are not "typical" for RSS feed reader application were removed, including (but not limited to) QtWebEngine component, AdBlock and file downloader.

That said, many other features were added, including great enhancements for article filtering. See the full list of changes below.

Added:

• New built-in ability to fetch FULL articles for your feeds. It is switchable in feed details dialog and you can even set to fetch plain text only version of your full articles. The feature is also available as a function for your article filters so you can call this feature selectively depending on conditions etc. The functionality itself is coded in extra binary named rssguard-article-scraper which you can also use externally. This tools requires Go compiler for building. (#1783)
• QuiteRSS import was added. Right-click any account item in feed list and you will see it. It imports categories, feeds, articles and labels. (#1707)
• Labels and regex queries (probes) now can have icons.
• Reddit plugin is now removed because Reddit shuts down class REST API access.
• Redesigned application icon, thanks to RonnyTNL for the initial designs.
• AppImages are back and better than before. They are available both in Qt 5 and Qt 6 versions. (#1808)
• Added two brand new simplistic default skins.
• Qt 5 version of RSS Guard on Windows uses custom-built Qt libraries with lower memory footprint and less dependencies.
• Added main menu action to enable/disable feed. Can be also of course assigned to keyboard shortcut. (#755)
• Application log dialog has Clear button. (#1902)
• Article filters can be exported/imported. (#1911)
• Ability to fast rename feeds and folders with F2 keyboard shortcut. (#1998)
• Ability to copy selected article(s) data in a custom format. (#1591)
• Dependency on Qt 5compat library is now removed and feed encoding conversions are handled either by simplified "QStringConverter" feature or full-blown ICU library, depending on RSS Guard build type and OS.
• Fetch metadata is now threaded and works if multiple feeds are selected at once.
• New main menu and article list context menu item Reveal feed which highlights the feed that the displayed article belongs to. (#1903)
• Feed list has new column Item ID which is hidden by default. Allows filtering feeds by their ID. (#966)
• External tools settings were redesigned and external tools can now be named. (#839)
• External tools now can be registered as default opening tool for domains. (#844)
• Ability to mark article above/below selected article as read/unread. (#244)
• New support for "RSS comments" specifications which is now per-feed configurable. (#878)
• Enclosures and attachments now can now be browsed, added, or removed via article filters. (#1024)
• Network proxy is now configurable even on a per-feed basis. So now we have per-feed, per-account and app-wide configuration options. (#417)
• New main menu items for focusing article preview, article list and feed list. (#1872)
• Added scrollable/paginated context menus where it makes sense. (#971)
• Turkish localization. (#1856)
• QtWebEngine is now gone and replaced by litehtml-based article renderer. This means greatly better memory footprint, less memory leaks, faster performance and smaller binaries.
• Default user data directory on Linux now does not contain spaces. (#1852)
• Article filters can now be reordered. (#908)
• You can see the number of disabled feeds in category/account details. (#1714)
• Article filters dialog was enhanced, allowing you to see which article properties are tweaked by the filter when testing the filter. Also, many other UI-related things were updated for that dialog. (#323, #1044, #1792, #1793)
• Category specifications are now supported for RSS, ATOM, RDF and JSON. It is also possible to work with these categories in article filters and convert them to labels. (#746)
• Feed list has initial focus when launching the app. (#1673)
• It is possible to turn anti-aliasing on or off for the whole app, or for article preview font or for article preview shapes. (#1432)
• It is possible to hide number of unread articles in main taskbar. (#1454)
• Confirmation added when marking everything as read or cleaning. (#1771)
• New ability to tweak application-wide font. (#1798)
• Article enclosures are now de-duplicated for each incoming article. (#1782)

Fixed:

• Logic and core code around labels has been completely refactored, resulting in better label management and UI experience. (#1212)
• Some logic was rewritten in media player, fixing some bugs along the way. (#1887)
• Fixed the behavior of sample notification. (#1886)
• Feeds are fetched on the startup (when configured) even if auto-fetching is paused. (#2023)
• Accept-Language HTTP header is explicitly set to RSS Guard active locale. (#1870)¨
• Cannot create duplicate labels anymore. (#972)
• Properly HTML-escape feed title in some places. (#2010)
• Some fixes around toolbar buttons that were not working. (#1834)
• Fixed handling of article URLs with custom ports. (#1802)
• Fixed handling of some XML entities. (#1770)
• Focus rectangle properly shown in feed and article list. (#1760)

Development builds (old 4.x line)

These development builds are here for EXPERIMENTING. Things will break and your data will burn in hell. You have been warned!!!

These development builds are automatically compiled from latest sources immediately after each source code change is made and always include newest features and bug fixes.

Individual "devbuild" releases are NOT cross-compatible between each other. This is usually because when I do upgrade internal database structures I do it gradually over several commits.

4.8.6

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)

4.8.5

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.

4.8.4

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)

4.8.3

Added:

• Application is now "self-signed" on Mac OS X. (#1679)

Fixed:

• Missing icons in some use-cases. (#1683)

4.8.2

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).

4.8.1

Fixed some untested code regression, sorry.

4.8.0

RSS Guard is feed reader and podcast player and now also becomes Gemini client! Spread the word!

Added:

• Support for Gemini protocol and gemtext markup files. (#1550)
• It is now possible to pause feed fetching. (#970)
• Reddit URLs are now parsed during feed discovery and found feed links are processed. (#1530)
• YouTube URLs are now parsed during feed discovery and found feed links are processed. (#1532)
• Click article icon in article list now switches read/unread state, the same way as clicking "starred" icon works. (#1521)
• Some RTL-related things were added. (#1371)
• User can now manually specify custom HTTP headers to be sent when fetching individual feeds. (f1d5c7d)
• Sounds of notifications can now be individually switched off. (6fa233f)
• Image caching in built-in LITE web viewer now takes image size into account, thus providing better scaling and visual UX. (4e698c9)
• In "Discover feeds" dialog, when mouse hovering above found feeds, more info is shown in tooltips. (5664b39)

Fixed:

• Compilation with MinGW compiler is now working without problems. Also MSYS2-FHS-related changes were applied. (#1540)
• Reduce number of duplicate feeds found in "Discover feeds" feature. (793cbcb, 78dc97f)