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In the News items not showing in Explore
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

Device: 6S
iOS: 11.1
Reproducibility: 100%
App version: 5.7.1 (and also 5.8.0)

In the news items are no longer appearing in the feed, even when they have been posted to the main page in the last 24 hrs. For example items related to the sale of a DaVinci painting and the situation in Zimbabwe did not appear in either today or yesterdays feed.

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

Note that we no longer expect news to show up for "past day" when loading older content in the feed. That is an expected change to the API based on cacheing needs. In this case the issue is recent (last 24hrs) posts.

Per our sync meeting lets discuss with reading infrastructure about how the API times and caches these items.

@JMinor an intermediate fix would be to allow older news content to populate further back in the feed. Currently, we hide older news stories from the feed (to prevent the problem that new users would scroll down and see the older story only to have it pushed away by older feed content). However, if the user has already loaded the older day, we never show the older news content (because it's un-hidden when that feed day loads from the network). Alternatively, we could show older news content within the current feed day (similar to how top read shows the previous date).

Here is an example of two feed responses that illustrate the problem:

11/29 is missing stories from 11/29:
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/feed/featured/2017/11/29

11/29 stories show up on 11/30:
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/feed/featured/2017/11/30

IIRC, we would get the latest news stories regardless of the feed day entered, so the app logic was set up to handle that. Now it appears the responses get frozen for a particular day. Would it be possible to cache the responses multiple times during the day, so that if a story is added later in the day and the user refreshes the feed on that day, they would get to see the latest story?

Testing on iPhone 6 Plus (iOS 11.1.2) - Wikipedia app 5.7.3 (1281). This still needs work as the latest article "in the news" of the explore feed is listed for Saturday December 9 which was a weekend ago.

T180728 Explore feed with in the news.PNG (2×1 px, 475 KB)
T180728 In the news feed.PNG (2×1 px, 731 KB)

Testing on iPhone 6 Plus (iOS 11.1.2) - Wikipedia app 5.7.3 (1296). The good news is "In the news" is now just 2 days old (December 18) instead of 4. The bad news is there is still no "In the news" for today or yesterday which the staff may still feel requires fixing, and still requires a long scroll down, because the iOS Wikipedia app doesn't have a way to remove most cards on the Explore page yet (a feature the Android version of the app has).

T180728.PNG (2×1 px, 1 MB)

Testing on iPhone 6 Plus (iOS 11.1.2) - Wikipedia app 5.7.4 (1302). @JMinor @JoeWalsh and everyone I think this is fixed now as "In the news" now shows results from the last 24 hours namely yesterday January 1.

T180728.PNG (2×1 px, 1 MB)