Editing "date" on a "News" tagged ebook makes it vanish...

[jangliss]

I stumbled on an oddity, and figured I'd post it, see if anybody can reproduce, and if it's a bug.



If you watch the video, make sure you hit the "CC" button, you'll see texts with steps to reproduce. You can reproduce doing the following:

1. Create a text file/or just import any ebook
2. Import file into Calibre
3. Edit the metadata of the ebook, and add a "News" tag
4. Change the "Date" field to a different date other than the imported date (I usually changed the month back a few).
5. Save the changes, and close Calibre
6. Reopen Calibre, wait until the heart/donate icon stops beating, and watch your ebook vanish.

Calibre has no issues editing the date on ebooks that don't have a "News" tag.

Weird eh? I discovered this after importing versions of the Linux Journal magazine ePub files. I found that if you tagged them with "News" they'd be sent to my Sony PRS-650 as a publication, but they had the wrong date on them. On changing the date, they vanished from Calibre.

I tested this on a "clean" configuration by doing the following:
- Renamed %USERPROFILE%\Calibre Library
- Renamed %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Calibre

System Information:
- Windows 7 Ultimate x64
- Calibre 0.8.29 (but I've seen this issue going back several versions)

[itimpi]

I suspect it is some sort of automated 'tidy' function to stop old news clagging up your calibre library?

[jangliss]

Originally Posted by itimpi

I suspect it is some sort of automated 'tidy' function to stop old news clagging up your calibre library?

Hah, that looks like it is it. If you set it back to older than 5 days, it removes it, any more recent, it keeps it. This lines up with the "Schedule News download" dialog, but there appears to be no way to turn it off, just increase the date range.

The only way I can see to actually disable it is if a recipe was setup, and you can disable the cleanup from the recipe. I guess I can dig into that a bit, though both of the ones mostly impacted by this issue are behind login walls, and provide either PDF or ePub downloads (along with random URLs).

Thanks for the hint, I didn't even think the news maintenance stuff would kick in when I don't have it set to download any news.

[kovidgoyal]

Simply set the delete news older than setting to zero, then news will not be deleted, as the tooltip for that control will tell you.

[jangliss]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Simply set the delete news older than setting to zero, then news will not be deleted, as the tooltip for that control will tell you.

So it does. Thanks to both of you for the help. I wouldn't have thought the maintenance ran even with no news downloads setup, and I wouldn't have noticed the tool tip if you hadn't mentioned it.