Follow-up to RSS Polling may take 20 minutes and more to process a feed and #43645, which stopped unchanged items being counted as imported by switching the poll job to post.previously_new_record? (poll_feed.rb#L132).
That fix leaves the other half of the status: an item that is already imported and unchanged is now reported as “Updated the existing topic” on every poll, because TopicEmbed.import returns its existing post whether or not it revised anything, and the status is previously_new_record? ? :imported : :updated.
We see the same label on 2026.7.3 ESR (there caused by the older check plus rss_polling_use_pubdate), and from reading main at 6ba633db it persists there; I have not run main to confirm.
Steps to reproduce
- Add a feed and poll it once, so its items are imported.
- Poll it again without the feed changing.
- Open the feed’s Recent polls.
Actual result: every item shows “Updated the existing topic”.
Expected result: unchanged items are reported as unchanged (or skipped), and “Updated” appears only when the post was actually revised.
TopicEmbed.import already computes whether anything changed (content_changed, title_changed, tags_changed in topic_embed.rb#L140-L153); exposing that result to the poll job would make the status accurate.