# RSS Quality Gate - stop garbage items polluting your feed data (`muazah/rss-quality-gate`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/muazah/rss-quality-gate.md
- **Developed by:** [muazah](https://apify.com/muazah) (community)
- **Categories:** Developer tools
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

$4.00 / 1,000 feed checkeds

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## RSS Quality Gate - stop garbage items polluting your feed data

**Pricing:** $0.004 per feed checked (up to 200 items per feed, all quality rows and the summary included).

Feed-to-database pipelines break quietly. A feed changes its GUID format and your automation posts everything twice. A duplicate slips in from a second source feed. Dates arrive malformed, titles come through as "Untitled", one feed 404s for a week and nobody notices. This Actor sits in front of your ingestion and gives every item a verdict with evidence, before it reaches your dataset, n8n flow or database.

### What gets flagged per item

- `duplicate` - same article link seen from another feed or earlier in the run, with the source named in `duplicate_of` (tracking parameters ignored)
- `guid_drift` - same article, but the feed changed its identity string since your last run. This is the #1 cause of duplicate triggers in IFTTT/Zapier/n8n pipelines
- `guid_collision` - two different articles sharing one GUID
- `missing_link`, `missing_title`, `placeholder_title` ("Untitled", "N/A", ...), `truncated_title`
- `missing_date`, `malformed_date`, `future_date`, `implausibly_old_date`

Per feed, a health record: `OK`, `UNCHANGED` (ETag/Last-Modified match, cheap re-runs), `FETCH_ERROR` or `PARSE_ERROR`, with item/clean/defect counts. The summary adds defect rate and per-defect totals across all feeds.

### Input

```json
{
  "feeds": ["https://example.com/feed.xml", "https://example.org/atom.xml"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 200,
  "stateName": "default"
}
```

RSS 2.0, Atom and RDF are supported. `stateName` selects the persisted state store: repeat runs reuse ETag/Last-Modified (unchanged feeds short-circuit) and compare GUIDs against the previous run to catch drift. Use a new name for a fresh baseline.

### Honest limits

- Items are a bounded newest-item sample per feed (default and max 200), not full history.
- Items that fall out of a feed's rolling window are simply absent - never reported as deleted.
- Duplicates are detected within a run and via GUID state across runs; semantic near-duplicates (same story, different URL) are out of scope.
- Article links are not fetched or validated - pair with a link checker if you need that.
- Feeds must be publicly reachable; authenticated feeds are not supported.

Built for data engineers and automation builders running feed-to-database, monitoring and content-aggregation pipelines.

# Actor input Schema

## `feeds` (type: `array`):

RSS 2.0, Atom or RDF feed URLs to check (up to 50 per run).

## `maxItemsPerFeed` (type: `integer`):

Bounded newest-item sample checked per feed, 1-200.

## `stateName` (type: `string`):

Name of the persisted ETag/GUID state store; use a new name for a fresh baseline. Enables 304 short-circuits and GUID-drift detection across runs.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "feeds": [
    "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"
  ],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 200,
  "stateName": "default"
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `qualityRows` (type: `string`):

Per-item verdicts (clean/defect with defect list, duplicate evidence, GUID drift) plus per-feed FEED\_QA health records.

## `summary` (type: `string`):

Feeds checked/failed, items total/clean/defect, defect rate, per-defect counts.

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "feeds": [
        "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("muazah/rss-quality-gate").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "feeds": ["https://hnrss.org/frontpage"] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("muazah/rss-quality-gate").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "feeds": [
    "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"
  ]
}' |
apify call muazah/rss-quality-gate --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,muazah/rss-quality-gate"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/dEcBHE0cjmBaHEqIP/builds/szDnIf2Q7IN9lfd64/openapi.json