Channel Downloading

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A quick question about channel downloading.  I have recently added some RSS feeds to the podcast plugin.  I enabled channel downloading (due to slow connection speeds for the server) and fired off the scheduled task to download the latest several episodes of my favorite podcasts.  I configured the downloaded content that is older than 14 days to be automatically deleted.  I now have a HUGE number of files in the downloads directory (I think because the podcasts I subscribed to have RSS dating all the way back to 2012) and I the task has been running for close to a week now without stopping.

 

Here is the question: does the server track how old the podcast content is based on the day it was downloaded (I assume the creation time of the file) or by the publication date of the specified episode?  Or is the above behavior a bug?