Yes, you can now mark all articles above or below current one as read!

There are several ways you can do it. There are new items in “Mark all as read” menu:

Mark above as read in in "Mark all as read" menu

There are keyboard shortcuts:

  • Shift + Q — mark above as read
  • Shift + Z — mark below as read

And there’s right-click article menu:

Article menu

Marking above or below as read works everywhere: feeds, starred or tagged items, smart streams, comments and search in everything referred above. And it doesn’t just mark loaded articles: marking below as read marks everthing till the end of the feed no matter loaded or not. So you can quicly dismiss older articles if you don’t want to read them.

Since BazQux Reader has comments this feature turned out to be much more complex than expected. For example, comments in already read (and not visible) articles are marked as read too (like “Mark all as read” does) so they don’t surprise you when you change view mode. And of course there are many corner cases in marking above or below from comment (hope that I handled them all ;).

As a side effect, “Mark all as read” now works in “Starred items” and “Tags” too (was silently ignored previously).

And there are options to unstar or untag above or below when you’re in starred or tagged items feed.

Article menu

Right click (long tap on mobile) on article headers in list view or on preview images in mosaic or magazine view to show article menu. On mobile you could use right-to-left swipe. On desktop you could right click at the bottom of the article or between blue cursor and article text.

It solves years long problem of saving and sharing in the middle of the article. It’s especially handy on mobile where almost any article is long enough to hide article buttons while you’re scrolling.

Additional menu items appear in comments (go to parent comment or post, collapse or expand children comments) and expanded list/mosaic/magazine articles (collapse article).

Tag and share buttons are no longer shown in articles on narrow mobile screen. It leaves more space for article titles and you could still tag and share via article menu.

Unread counters in “Starred items” and “Tags”

Starred and tagged feeds show number of unread items now. You could use this feature to track new comments in specific posts. Tag your post with some tag, then set tag view mode to first one (with comments expanded). Tag’s unread counter will show number of unread comments in tagged posts (source feed could still have comments collapsed and only show new posts).

This feature also turned out to be more complex than expected and led to a big rewrite in how unread numbers are counted. As a result unread numbers update faster, use less traffic and several nasty bugs were fixed.

Don’t know whether you’ve seen folder showing 1 unread item after all feeds in this folder were read but I’ve tried to get rid of this for years and now it finally fixed! Negative unread counts after “Skip” or “Ignore” in smart streams are also gone.

Smart streams and fiters speedup

The more people use reader the more filters & smart streams they have. And when people have 200 smart streams working on 2000 feeds it’s time to optimize things a bit ;)

Smart streams and filters are now updated 2-4 times faster. It’s especially visible on first page load. Editing is faster too thanks to much less traffic used.

Price increase

Year subscription now costs $30. I’ve increased price in March. Price stayed the same since 2014 and many features were added so I decided to increase it. BazQux Reader is still 2-3 times cheaper than other readers with comparable feature set.

Reader is profitable since 2014. There was a slow decline of a number of active users since 2014 till mid-2019. Now there’s growth in both active and new users (actually, there are more new users each year since 2017 but until 2019 it was not enough to offset churn of people coming from Google Reader Apocalypse of 2013).

But there’s growth in costs too. While server costs are roughly the same, other costs have increased. I have two daughters now (and waiting for a boy!), need to rent office so I can focus, need to rent bigger apartment. So I came to a point where BazQux earns me enough for living but not enough for growth of the service.

I think that reader is really cool now (many features are still missing, but the look and mobile interface are wonderful) and most competitors are either out of business or started asking money so it’s time to make more serious advertising and I need money for this.

Help unsuspending @BazQuxReader account on Twitter

Update (September, 2020): Twitter has unsuspended @BazQuxReader account. No communication about reasons but it works now and that’s good.

Previous content of this section for history:

For some unknown reason Twitter has suspended @BazQuxReader account in May. I haven’t even used it for a couple weeks before this.

I’ve sent a request to Twitter to unsuspend account but 2.5 months passed and I still haven’t received any answer. If anybody is working at Twitter I would be grateful if you can help me in unsuspending @BazQuxReader account.

NB: There are no issues with “Log in with Twitter” and fetching Twitter feeds since they’re linked with my developer account.

For reporting issues, please, mail support@bazqux.com or use Discourse community.

And some more…

  • Feed Creator service from Five Filters is now hosted on createfeed.bazqux.com and is free for BazQux Reader users (other readers are blocked). It allows you to create feed from webpages that doesn’t have one (requires basic knowledge of HTML & CSS).
  • PDF Newsletter, another service from FiveFilters is hosted on pdf.bazqux.com. You could try it to make a PDF from your public feed for starred items or any other feed.
  • Automatic switch to dark theme when OS is set to dark mode (color theme in Appearance dialog is set for current OS mode, so you can set different themes for dark and light modes).
  • Link updates in feeds are now handled.
  • Newly subscribed feeds are automatically added to filters and smart streams that work with more than half of your feeds.
  • Twitter threads are shown when exclude_replies option is used (were excluded as replies previously).
  • Added support for audio and documents in Telegram channels.
  • The height of videos is limited so that they fit fully into the screen.
  • Faster updates of Facebook feeds.
  • Faster loading of proxied video.
  • Faster loading of article comments (previously next articles were also loaded when there are few comments).
  • Search in streams or folders that are grouped by feed respects user feeds order (by drag’n’drop).
  • Newsboat console feed reader supports BazQux Reader. It’s not for everybody but true veterans may like it ;)

Happy reading!