The purge mechanism is complicated and when you "purge" something, you really don't purge it at all. You are really just hiding it from your reader. For this reason, I'd like to rename that feature at some point. Interestingly, the package NEVER cleans up its entries table so it will continue to accumulate entries and slow down quite a bit after a while, I'd imagine. Fortunately, Dave B passed along a scheduled procedure he wrote to periodically clean up his personal copy of news-aggregator and I added that the released version. Right now, the "age" of an entry that can be deleted is hardcoded (currently 180 days) but eventually, it will be a parameter or admin option. The procedure will only delete old entries that have not been saved by any user.