Actually after clicking the button and leaving the empty window open for a while, the wallpaper list gets populated.
We just need to add a message to the window when it first open, advising the user to wait for a few seconds.

From the ML.

> The feed is still not-quite-working (no new additions since Nov. of last
> year, even though there are newer wallpapers on the site)
I noticed that as well. It is possible that a new list (with a different name) is now used. If that is the case and it does not require major changes, we should look at adding the new list as well when fixing bug 2093.

This might be a bit more involved; I'm not sure how it was working in the first place.

The URL that our KHotNewStuff application is currently using is:
http://www.kstuff.org/hotstuff/providers/index.xml

That URL has been down for many years.

The replacement is:
http://download.kde.org/ocs/providers.xml

however I don't know if the file format is compatible with our KHNS version.

Upon closer inspection it appears that the background dialog obtains its provider information from this URL:
http://files.kde.org/khotnewstuff/wallpaper-providers.xml

which means the wallpaper list comes from this location:
http://download.kde.org/khotnewstuff/wallpaper/wallpaper.xml

Unfortunately http://download.kde.org/khotnewstuff/wallpaper/wallpaper.xml has not been updated since 2013 as noted in this report.

I have not yet been able to find a replacement data source.  At minimum, the syntax has changed and worst case there may be no data source available at all.

After quite a bit of digging I found the replacement system and its base URLs:

content provider list:
http://download.kde.org/ocs/providers.xml

wallpapers:
http://api.opendesktop.org/v1/content/data?categories=1x2x3x4x5x6x7&search=&sortmode=new&page=1&pagesize=

The KHNS and OCS file formats, while both XML-based, are incompatible with each other.  Additionally it seems that the KHNS feed is frozen with no additional updates being provided.

Therefore, we will need to rewrite the KHNS library in tdelibs to handle the new OCS format.

> Therefore, we will need to rewrite the KHNS library in tdelibs to handle
> the new OCS format.
Tim, thanks for your "digging". In such case I propose we proceed as follow:
1) we add a message to the window when it first opens, advising the user to wait for a few seconds so it get populated.
2) when this is done, we remove this bug from the v14.0.0 official bug list
3) we leave the bug open for the required changes to handle the new OCS format, but those changes will not go in v14.0.0.
How do you think?

I was able to rework the KHNS code to properly download wallpaper listings and wallpapers from the new OCS network in GIT hash 47ac409 (tdelibs).

There are a few glitches remaining, and I have not yet implemented the "Please Wait" screen or updated the wallpaper source URL, but the core functionality seems to work at this time.  The data feeds are quite different; it looks like OpenDesktop.org might have a bug that is preventing proper filtering of entries (e.g. when looking for highest rated wallpapers, the API seems to return a random sampling of wallapers sorted by rating instead of a list of the highest rated papers).

Of more concern is the fact that the OpenDesktop.org site is poorly maintained and appears to be in bad financial shape; if it were to collapse a large amount of data from the KDE 3.5.x era would disappear.  We should probably start backing up whatever data we can, trying not to overload their server in the process.

I will be testing and committing the relevant kdesktop changes shortly.  As soon as I do that we will not be dependent on any KDE-provided infrastructure for this functionality.

Wallpaper selection and download fixed in GIT hashes f6d69d4 (tdelibs) and 5d2b928 (tdebase).

Still need to fix API sorting and add the "Please Wait" screen.

The data glitch and missing loading screen are both resolved in GIT hash d2be9f6 (tdelibs).

Thanks for reporting!

Created attachment 2278 [details]
Latest list

It seems that the "Latest" list shows most of the entries twice (see attachment).
Not sure if it is our problem or a list source problem (haven't checked yet)
I am reopening the bug.

(In reply to Michele Calgaro from comment #10)
> Created attachment 2278 [details]
> Latest list
> 
> It seems that the "Latest" list shows most of the entries twice (see
> attachment).
> Not sure if it is our problem or a list source problem (haven't checked yet)
> I am reopening the bug.

It's a data source problem (again).  In this case it's due to one particular user uploading identical wallpapers to the "KDE Wallpapers" and "Gnome Wallpapers" categories.  TDE displays all wallpapers regardless of category to make sure users can find what they want; in this case nothing can really be done to fix it as each duplicated wallpaper is separate (each has a different content ID) on the data source.

This is probably caused by some of the problems mentioned in Bug 2127 comment 43; basically OpenDesktop.org appears to be unmaintained and the users are running the show.  If it were maintained and I were in charge I would prevent duplicates by allowing each file to be part of multiple categories, and disallow uploads of the same content type with the same name, but alas we have no control. :-)

Fare enough. Thanks for checking it out. Ok with closing the bug again.