Rogue time travel issue on Boing category posts

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.

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That was never automatic. @doctorow would do each one manually and personally make the picks.

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Huh. Color me even more impressed then.

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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?

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Highly doubtful.

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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.

August 25 - https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/149481166773/feynman-comic-biography-of-an-iconoclastic
August 21 - <em>Feynman</em>: comic biography of an iconoclastic physicist

August 25 - https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/149479944040/exotic-debt-trap-mortgages-about-to-turn-on-their
August 22 - Exotic debt-trap mortgages about to turn on their owners

August 25 - https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/149478707292/dress-made-from-sock-monkeys-10yrsago
August 21 - Dress made from sock-monkeys

August 25 - https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/149477430197/ghost-town-dial-up-bbses-still-online-10yrsago
August 21 - Ghost town dial-up BBSes still online

August 25 - https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/149474929994/california-to-become-first-state-to-limit
August 22 - California to become first state to limit greenhouse emissions

… Jumping back a few weeks, see if the pattern holds …

July 31 - https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/148252938740/flowchart-shows-the-complexity-of-the-new
July 30 - Flowchart shows the complexity of the New Zealand’s Internet Disconnection copyright law



If I’m right, by Tuesday we should see Three-hole punch debut, April 1940 and New Zealand wants a Ministry of DRM show up on Cory’s Tumblr.

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?

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Really excellent detective work sir. Let’s see.

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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.

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Oooh, my estimate was way too high. https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/149564077063/three-hole-punch-debut-april-1940-10yrsago was just posted at 2:41pm EDT on Saturday August 28th and https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/149558246545/new-zealand-wants-a-ministry-of-drm-10yrsago was posted at 12:06pm EDT.

Now to just keep an eye out for any new WABAC Machine failures here on the BBS.

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Interesting. You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack: a collection of Tom Gauld's brilliant cartoons just repeated here on the BBs despite Cory’s presumed unavailability. Now we watch to see if this post gets featured on his Tumblr in a few days time.

@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?

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I wonder if that would cause problems with intentionally reposting older material. That has been done before.

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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.

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Not knowing how the 2 are integrated, I have no idea if that’s feasible or if it would disrupt anyone’s workflow.

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Oblig. XKCD

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That was a Mark Frauenfelder post though. Does that affect your theory at all?

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.

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Here we are again. Cory’s back from Burning Man and new time travel threads are showing up. We went nine days without any repeats, excepting that rogue Frauenfelder post that never showed up on Cory’s tumblr, and now we have Wikipedia’s dumbest arguments posted at 9:15pm EDT on Sept. 6th.

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@eviltrout can we prevent very old posts from triggering topic creation? Say anything more than a year old?

I took a quick peek and it doesn’t seem like the created_at date is being passed over by the wordpress plugin. We do support it optionally via the api.

It looks like it needs to be added to wp-discourse – additionally it occurs to me that we could put the same check on the wordpress side. In other words, don’t send over something whose date is over X.

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OK, we need to get the latest version of the WordPress plugin installed here anyway, it has been bugging me for a while that BBS entries don’t show the comment count any more @beschizza. Can we schedule some time with @orenwolf to make this happen?