@codinghorror I don’t know enough about the underlying structure of Word Press or what may be going on there to be sure this is related and maybe it’s something y’all already noticed. I looked around for a thread on it and didn’t find anything so hopefully I’m not summoning y’all in vain. Sorry in advance if it doesn’t help at all.
On one of the recent time travel threads I noticed that the meta information for the post date matched up with the day the article went live but there’s another line in there:
meta property="article:modified_time" content="2016-08-15T23:51:43+00:00"
meta property="article:modified_time" content="2016-08-15T23:53:58+00:00"
Based on the times, I’m guessing it’s some kind of automated Word Press cleanup function. Maybe whatever y’all are using on the Discourse side can filter out posts from the distant past or posts where the modified time is more than a year past the article:published_time. Course, I don’t know if Discourse is getting the metas at all.
I think you are on to something. I’ve also noticed that the posts are usually one year old to the day so I suspect either it’s a process that happens once a year perhaps to clean out old stuff, or something is comparing the wrong dates.
Unfortunately we don’t pass the modified_time across to Discourse.
I do wonder if we can upgrade the plugin to avoid posting really old things. That would involve bringing in someone more familiar with the PHP side of it though.
I’ve mostly seen posts from five and ten years ago exactly, leading me to think this is may be part of the old “This Day in Blogging History” feature that was discontinued back in 2014. Maybe @jlw or @beschizza can look to see if some automatic part of that feature was re-activated recently.
Another thought. I’ve noticed on Cory’s Tumblr that he still highlights posts from five and ten years ago. Is it possible that when he’s browsing through the old posts that he’s inadvertently tripping the modified date?
I think it might be worth looking into. Not every past post that Cory highlights on his Tumblr gets a repeat thread here on the BBS, but quite a few of them do. And looking at the pattern of events the Tumblr post always comes after the repeat BBS thread which would make sense if Cory is placing these old links in his Tumblr queue to post later.
Edit: So Cory’s going to be at Burning Man until Sept. 5th. and supposedly off the grid. Another test to my hypothesis - do any repeat threads show up on the BBS during Cory’s absence?
This is caused by editing old pre-Discourse era postings in Wordpress, simply because the UI defaults to having “Post to Discourse” checked. As these old posts never had Discourse threads, they are created by the edits.
@codinghorror or @sam, I’m woefully uninformed as to how you’ve tied Discourse and Wordpress together, but would it be possible to have some kind of “do not post to Discourse if originally posted prior to date” kind of check?
Perhaps it could work such that posts prior to the specified date didn’t have “Post to Discourse” checked by default but the box could still be checked if desired.
Not really. Though most of the posts that Cory features in his flashbacks are his, he does include some from other editors. The California greenhouse gas post that showed up on the BBS on August 22nd was originally by Xeni, for instance.
