Question: Why must articles be archived before manually deletion? Can they not be removed directly from the source feed?
If I maintain a large archive it can be tricky to identify the ones I want to delete.
What am I missing?
you want ttrss to keep a record of all manually deleted posts so that it would know what to delete from the feed xml? 
Apologies for my ignorance, but what does that mean?
Maybe it helps if you think about how a feed reader works in general. Let’s say you’re subscribed to a feed at www.some-site.tld/feed.xml. At the moment you subscribe, the feed.xml contains the postings A, B, C and D.
Some time later, tt-rss updates the feed. Now the feed.xml contains the postings B, C, D and E. The posting E is considered to be “new”, because tt-rss doesn’t know about it yet. According to the feed reader, the feed contains now A, B, C, D and E.
Now let’s say you delete posting D. Now the feed, according to the feed reader, contains A, B, C and E.
When the feed is updated the next time, the feed.xml contains for example C, D, E and F. So which postings get considered as “new”? The ones the feed reader doesn’t know about, in this case D and F.
And presto, the posting you deleted pops up again 
Because of this, the feed reader needs to “remember” which postings were deleted, so it doesn’t consider them to be “new” when it runs into them again in the source feed.
Thanks for the details. I considered the “Archive” to be a “keep forever” collection. If I understand your explanation correctly, it appears to be a TrashCan or RecycleBin.
So if I Archive an article from a feed, it goes into the “Archive” collection. Then if I Delete the same article from there, it’s gone UNLESS it appears the next time the feed.xml is processed.
If I leave the article in the “Archive”, is it eventually removed from there? Under what conditions?
can you maybe read the archived feed wiki page already instead of posting your assumptions?
tldr (because i know you won’t): don’t archive anything manually. use starred to keep articles forever.
it’s not.
no.
e: every iteration of this makes me think that manual archiving menu options should probably be removed because its clearly confusing, at least to some people.
https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/commit/b2993bcd3076ac20ab02d2402c0217ace0ac6d02
inb4: “how do i archive articles???”
In which case the “You can also manually archive articles from the feed actions ( i.e. More…) dropdown menu and subsequently move them back if the originating feed is still available (e.g. subscribed).” text needs removing from Tiny Tiny RSS – Archived Feed
yep, thanks for noticing.
e: Tiny Tiny RSS – Archived Feed I’ve shortened the wiki page because it was repeating itself a lot.
https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/commit/da0ad82c2497ed34cb29cf78e29c75a4d4ffb8bd 
Oh, I see now. It’s not an Archive. It’s an Orphanage.
My expectations are now set accordingly.
p.s. Thanks for pointing out the Wiki page and updating it.
yes, indeed. would be a bit too depressing to call it like that in the ui.