display feed icons on frontpage

[Niehztog]

This PR adds the display of the icon of each bridge on the front page of rss bridge. If the icon uri cannot be resolved, the icon will be hidden.
The code change in FrontpageAction.php is just a small refactoring and is optional.

[github-actions]

Pull request artifacts

Bridge	Context	Status
BlizzardNews	1 untitled (current)	⚠️ (shutdown) 8192: Function utf8_decode() is deprecated in lib/XPathAbstract.php line 637
BlizzardNews	1 untitled (pr)	⚠️ (shutdown) 8192: Function utf8_decode() is deprecated in lib/XPathAbstract.php line 637
Nius	1 untitled (current)	✔️
Nius	1 untitled (pr)	✔️

last change: Monday 2023-11-13 21:55:32

[gsantner]

This is a really bad change I would say.

It means that if the provider enabled lets say 100 bridges that has icon defined - then each visitor of frontpage makes additional 100 HTTP requests to bridge !!external!! URLs. Which can be abused for tracking users of rss-bridge on each of these 100 sites without visitors knowing it. Without using the bridge even.

If this has to be done really at dashboard, I would suggest to make it so rss-bridge fetches the icon on it's own and the image is served from rss-bridge cache only .

Just by example of this PR, it adds a quite unique URL which looks concerning.

b34a003c6f2f637ee8f4f7b406f3b9b120b918c04cabec7f03a760e708977ea9689a1c638f4396def8dce7b202cd007eae91946cc3c4a578aa8b5694226cfc6.ico

[dvikan]

i agree. resource heave and privacy issue.

rssbridge could act as a proxy and serve icons but that would be a new feature.

[Niehztog]

Hello @dvikan and @gsantner ,
thank you very much for your valuable feedback regarding security/privacy and ressource heave of my PR. I addressed all those issues in my latest commit. Please take a look.

[Niehztog]

The code has been further improved to decrease loading times and save performance. This has been accomplished by applying a timeout value of 10 seconds when loading images and storing information about broken images in cache to prevent continued attempts to load them.

The PR is now ready of being merged.

[dvikan]

@Niehztog thanks for the effort but wont merge this

[Niehztog]

@dvikan could you please explain your decision? All issues are addressed, so whats the problem?

[dvikan]

Main reason is visiting the front page produces 438 network calls which is too burdensome/slow/annoying for users.

Also low code quality. Sorry.

[Niehztog]

@dvikan Thank you for clarification. We could work together to address those issues you see in the code quality. You could just tell me which parts need to be improved.
The issue with the amount of network requests could be addressed by limiting display of feed icons only to activated bridges.

[dvikan]

For example on https://rss-bridge.org/bridge01/ all 436 bridges are enabled/activated. We cant generate that many network calls for a single user. Not good ux.

[Niehztog]

I agree