That would be unfortunate if true. Honestly, if I could I would do away with the "read/unread" concept altogether. Are there really people out there who want to read absolutely everything in their feeds?

Depends, take a look at the rest of your settings in the Archiving page.

You might have set "Never delete Unread Articles".

Also, that purge job is on a cron. I'm not sure how often it'll run. Could be once a week or even month. Thousands of rss articles and links are only a few megabytes big. But you can push the "purge now" button at the bottom of the archiving page to check your settings.

Is there a debug log that details what it is or is not deleting and why or why not?

I use Reeder on iOS and if I get to the bottom of a list, I get an option to mark everything as read.

But personally, I go through the articles kind of like videos on TikTok and read only those that sound interesting.

Pretty sure there are, or just skim it, but definitely at the end use the "i have seen these" button.
(Also, if an entry is already marked as read, but it gets updated in the feed it will pop up as unread!)

You probably need the "Mark an article as read… upon receiving the article" among the reading options to achieve what you want.

I had not noticed that option! Thank you so much. It did not solve the problem in my original post but it's still very helpful.

Nope I don't have that checked. I also marked all as read and ran a purge manually and it did not delete them.

Thanks for the responses I may just totally wipe then reinstall with my preferred settings and see if it takes this time.

Cool, did you install freshrss as a docker container, or as a package? I've also had issues with it not setting up crons and running them properly before too. Running the docker container helps, usually.

Make sure none of the exceptions are ticked and the Minimum number of articles to keep per feed is also 25 or below. Then its up to the cron when that runs so you might have to manually purge it and optimise the database to see what it will actually keep.

I can't say I have ever worried about it, been running FreshRSS for years and it seems to keep its database size in check fairly well and the defaults have worked fine for me and it rarely gets above 100MB. So I know it "loosely" works in that old articles are absolutely getting purged in time but have no idea how strictly it follows these rules.

I think this can happen if the feed itself (the rss/atom file) has more articles than you specify. As far as I know this setting really only applies to articles it cached that are no longer visible on the feed.