Clarification on RSS node working

Questions
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1

Need some more details about the RSS Trigger node and RSS read node

  1. How does the RSS trigger node handle duplicate article posts ?
  2. If a blog/article is updated would it fetch it
  3. Generally the GUID is used to keep track and not re-fetch an existing blog, so how does the RSS trigger know when to Poll and when not to do it ?

Information on your n8n setup

  • n8n version: 1.118.2
  • Database (default: SQLite): Postgres Db
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main): default
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app): Docker
  • Operating system: Linux VM on GCP
2

hey @Punosie

The RSS Feed Trigger polls the feed at the interval you configure and only emits new items since the last check. n8n keeps track of previously seen items so duplicates aren’t emitted again.

If a blog post is updated but keeps the same GUID/link, it usually won’t trigger again, since it’s already considered processed.

The RSS Read node is different, it simply fetches the feed and returns the current items each time it runs, without tracking previous executions.

Docs:

3

So the RSS Feed Trigger actually uses pubDate to track whats new, not GUID like youd expect. It compares each item’s publish date against when it last polled, so if a post gets updated but the pubDate stays the same it wont pick it up again. If the pubDate does get bumped to a newer timestamp though itll treat it as new. This also means you can get duplicates if a feed has wonky dates, so if reliability matters Id store processed GUIDs in your Postgres db and check against that before processing

4

Okay Thanks