How to Find Stale Feeds with the Dinosaurs Window

On your Mac, choose Window > Dinosaurs to open the window. You’ll see something like this:

Screenshot of the Dinosaurs window

On iOS (TBD…)

(The Dinosaurs feature was added in NetNewsWire 7.1, released in July 2026.)

How to list stale feeds

Edit the text field at the top of the window to choose a number of months. (You can also click the stepper on Mac.)

The default is six months, but you might want to see feeds that haven’t updated in 24 months, for instance.

The table lists feed name, feed URL, account (if you have multiple accounts), date of the last article that the app has in its database, and the last response code the app got for that feed.

In some cases there may not be a last article — this is not an error in the app. It’s just a thing that can happen.

There may also not be a last response code. (Maybe that domain doesn’t exist anymore.)

But when there is a last response code, it can be helpful. These codes are http response codes. Here’s a quick guide to what you’re likely to see:

200: feed exists and is responding fine
304: feed exists and is fine — it’s just saying there have been no changes since the last check

A feed can respond with 200 or 304 and still be finished. Old things exist on the web that will never be updated but that still work normally. It’s up to you to judge whether or not these feeds are likely to be finished.

404: feed not found
410: feed is gone for real

A feed can respond with a 404 and not actually be gone. At this writing, YouTube feeds do that for several hours a day for unknown reasons. (Clearly a YouTube bug.)

However, if a feed responds with 410 it’s almost surely gone for good. This is a very deliberate choice on the part of a publisher. (And super rare.)

What the Buttons Do

Select in Sidebar selects the feed in the main window. This way you can see what articles are included in the feed.

Delete removes the selected feed or feeds. It will confirm first before deleting.

Open Home Page opens the home page of the feed in your browser.

Copy Feed URL copies the feed URL of the selected feed or feeds.

Also Useful

The Error Log lists errors downloading feeds, including timeouts and DNS failures and so on. This can be of further help in deciding which feeds to delete.