Refresh and the fetch log

The schedule

The engine fetches every feed on its own, in the background, on an interval that follows the feed: a feed that posts hourly is read about hourly, a feed that posts once a month is read a few times a day. The interval never goes below your plan's floor, every hour on the free plan and every ten minutes on Pro, and never above a day. A feed that has not posted for a long time is read every six hours.

The entries arrive without any action on your part. The +N new chip in the top bar says that the view has new entries since it was drawn; click it to bring them in.

Manual refresh

The refresh button in the top bar fetches the feed you are in right now, or every feed of a category or of All. Each plan has a budget of manual refreshes per hour, and one feed is refreshed at most once per hour from the button; past that, the request is refused with the time to wait. A feed is still refreshed on its schedule in the meantime.

A manual refresh is also what revives a frozen feed (below).

Paused and frozen

• Paused is yours: Pause updates in Feed Settings → General. The feed is not fetched for you until you untick it.
• Frozen is the engine's: a feed that failed several fetches in a row is set aside instead of being hammered. Each failure already doubles the wait before the next try, up to a day; after enough of them the feed is frozen until a manual refresh succeeds. The fetch log shows the error.

A feed that nobody follows any more is not fetched at all.

Errors

A fetch that fails once, a server that answers 503 for a minute, costs nothing but a longer wait before the next try. The feed's icon in the sidebar does not change; the fetch log records it.

The fetch log

Feed Settings → General, folded under «the last fetches and why nothing new». One line per fetch, newest first:

• When the fetch ran.
• Status, the HTTP status the site answered. 200 means the feed was read; 304 means the site said it had not changed since the last fetch, so nothing was downloaded; anything else is an error, and the Error column says what.
• New, how many entries of that fetch were not seen before. A feed that answers 200 with nothing new is a feed that has not posted, not a broken one.

The administrator also sees how many items the feed carried and how long the fetch took.