Why does comments.txt have a date?

[samnabi]

I can't seem to figure out where the comments.txt date field is used. Why do we need this variable?

[florianpircher]

As described in README#file-structure, KirbyComments does not ship with a template for comments.txt files. Because of that those pages are not styles nor reachable by clicking internal links. However, developers are free to make comments.txt a publicly accessible page.

For that reason, a creation date is stored alongside the comments page. It does not wast a lot of space and is useful for creating a pages dedicated to listing all comments of other pages. Personally, I don’t have strong feeling on whether to keep it or not.

To conclude:

• the date field is not used by the plugin
• we do not need it, it’s simply a convenience access to the creation date of the first comment
• it is redundant information and wastes space, but the impact is (I think) negligible
• I am happy to remove it, if any reasons for doing so are brought forth

[samnabi]

I have no strong opinions one way or the other. I'm just doing some debugging (imported a lot of comments from Disqus) and wanted to make sure to rule out this date field as a potential cause of bugs.