RSS and auto-download rules

The RSS tab

Ctrl+R or Ctrl+3 (also View → RSS Feeds…) shows the RSS tab in place of the transfers. Esc returns.

• Feeds on the left: All feeds first, then each feed with its unread count, and a glyph while it refreshes or after it failed.
• Articles of the chosen feed on the right: title (bold while unread), date and feed, with a filter box and an Unread only toggle above them. An article whose torrent a rule or Download already added has a glyph before its title.
• The article’s text, plain, with its link, below.

The article columns are remembered.

Feeds

Add a feed with N in the tab, the Add feed… button, or Settings → RSS → Feeds. Give its URL; a blank name takes the feed’s own title. The feed is fetched once to check it. RSS 2.0 and Atom are read.

An article’s torrent is its enclosure, a magnet in its link, guid or text, a <torrent:magnetURI>, or an info-hash element.

Feeds are refreshed every 30 minutes by default (Settings → RSS → Refresh every (minutes), 5 to 1440), and a feed can have its own interval. F5 refreshes the chosen feed and Shift+F5 every feed. An unchanged feed costs one request: the last answer’s ETag and Last-Modified go back, and the server answers “not modified”. A failure becomes the feed’s status (“last error: the server answered 404”).

New articles are merged by guid with their read state kept, up to 500 per feed; the oldest are dropped.

Reading and downloading

Choosing an article marks it read. M toggles read on the article, Shift+M marks the whole feed read.

Enter or a double-click on an article with a torrent opens the Add dialog for it, marked “FROM RSS”; a .torrent link is fetched first. The right-click menu’s Download adds it at once with the defaults, no dialog. Ctrl+C copies the torrent link or the page link. Delete in the feed list removes a feed after asking (the torrents already added stay).

Rules

A rule adds new articles’ torrents by itself. Rules live under Settings → RSS → Rules, with Add…, Edit…, Remove and Duplicate.

What a rule wants

• Must contain: words that must all appear in the title, case-insensitive. | separates alternatives. Blank takes every title.
• Must not contain: words that rule a title out.
• Regular expressions: read both fields as regular expressions instead.
• Episode filter, in qBittorrent’s syntax, read off S01E02, 1x02 or Season 1 Episode 2 in the title. Blank takes every episode.
• Smart episode filter: an episode taken once is not taken again. The rule remembers what it took (the last thousand).
• Ignore older than a number of days; 0 for no limit.
• Feeds: which feeds it reads. None ticked means every feed, including those added later.

A filter or a regular expression that does not read is said under the form, and Save is held back until it does.

What it does with a match

• Start: paused, started, or as the Add dialog’s default says.
• Category: the category’s folder is then the save path.
• Save to: a folder of its own. Blank means the category’s folder, else the download folder.

Matches as you type

The rule dialog lists every article the feeds hold that the rule would take, re-read as you type. Articles already downloaded are listed too; the rule skips them.

Running the rules

Turn on Download new articles’ torrents automatically (above the rules). Then every refresh runs the rules over the feed’s new articles: the first enabled rule that wants an article takes it, its torrent is added (a magnet as it is, a .torrent link fetched first), and the article is marked downloaded and read. An article is never added twice. The Event Log says “Rule ‘Linux ISOs’ added … from feed …”, or why it could not.

Run RSS Rules Now (the File menu, the palette, and Run rules now on the page) goes over every unread article not yet downloaded, whether the switch is on or not.

Create Rule from Title… in an article’s right-click menu opens the rule dialog with the title’s words before its episode number already filled in.

What is kept where

Feeds, articles and rules stay on this machine and never sync: rss/feeds.json, rss/articles/<id>.json and rss/rules.json in the config folder. The refresh interval and the auto-download switch are settings, and they sync.