Re-publishing of published articles changes date of publication

[frediy]

From robot...@gmail.com on August 29, 2011 07:59:08

There is some feature (I'm not sure what) that allows republishing a published article, resetting its publication time to current time, even if it was published long ago. I'm guessing it's what happens if you press "Publish" instead of "Save and continue" after making an edit.

This causes certain confusion, since articles appear on the fron page and in other lists sorted by date of publication, so a recently "republished" article will be listed as "just published", even though it was actually published earlier. Its date of publication will also be reset, so that the comments posted before "republishing" bear an older publication timestamp.

For example, this post was "republished" on 28 Aug, but was first published earlier, and has comments published on 27 Aug: http://lesswrong.com/lw/79x/polyhacking/ I think this "republishing" should be considered a bug and disabled.

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=266

[frediy]

From DRPow...@gmail.com on August 28, 2011 16:16:21

The current code updates the "date" on an article when it changes subreddit. I agree that updating the date when "re-publishing" is suboptimal. The difficulty is identifying when an article is first published and only setting the date then. This requires some thought

[frediy]

From robot...@gmail.com on August 30, 2011 09:47:14

When an article changes subreddit, the date does seem to reset. But I wasn't talking about that case.

In the cases where I noticed this happening, subreddid doesn't seem to have changed, at least the original article and the article with its publication date having beed reset appear in the same subreddit (perhaps in the interim the article was moved back and forth, but that seems unlikely).

[frediy]

From DRPow...@gmail.com on August 30, 2011 15:32:11

I don't think simply editing an article will changes its date. However, retracting it back to your "drafts", then later re-submitting to a public subreddit will reset the date.

Is this what happened in the example you described?

[frediy]

From robot...@gmail.com on August 30, 2011 15:37:56

All I know is that on a number of occasions, an article in Main had its publication date reset a few days after publication, that is returning to the same subreddit with a new publication date. These weren't my articles, so I can't confirm whether they were re-submitted through drafts.

[frediy]

From DRPow...@gmail.com on August 30, 2011 16:54:31

After some internal discussions, here is our intended fix:

When an article is moved to a new subreddit:

1. If this is the first time the article was posted to this subreddit, store the subreddit+date for the article
2. Set the publication date for the article to be the date that this article was first posted to this subreddit

This will maintain the original publication date when an article is posted to a subreddit, then retracted, then reposted to the same subreddit. However, if an article is moved from, say, the "discussion" subreddit to the "main" subreddit the publication date on the article will be changed to the date when this move occurred.

[frediy]

From wjmo...@gmail.com on April 19, 2012 23:38:06

Dave, did this one get addressed?

Cc: DRPow...@gmail.com

[frediy]

From wjmo...@gmail.com on April 19, 2012 23:38:15

Status: Accepted

[frediy]

From robot...@gmail.com on May 09, 2012 21:47:07

Moving of posts from Main to Discussion is becoming a common use case, and it's confusing when old articles that are moved from Main to Discussion obtain new publication date. See this one for example (cf. date of the comments): http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/bl2/a_belief_propagation_graph/ I think the posts shouldn't change their publication date when moved between subreddits, at least if it's a Main->Discussion move (maybe specifically when it's a Main->Discussion move). Articles are more or less "archived" when moved to Discussion, so they don't need to be properly announced (by moving them at the top of the list, assigning recent publication time). When moving to Main, however, current behavior might be right.

[frediy]

From robot...@gmail.com on May 09, 2012 21:53:09

Another observation: A sequence of posts was just moved from Main to Discussion, and the posts came out in Discussion in the reverse order because of the reassignment of publication date. This clearly shouldn't happen. I understand it's not even currently possible to manually rearrange them back in the right order.

[frediy]

From wjmo...@gmail.com on May 09, 2012 21:57:09

I agree. The current behaviour makes sense for moving articles out of Drafts to Main and from Main to Promoted but as you example shows does not make sense form Main to Discussion. I'll give some thought to the best way to deal with it.

Cc: -DRPow...@gmail.com

[frediy]

From wjmo...@gmail.com on July 01, 2012 16:03:07

Issue 317 has been merged into this issue.

[frediy]

From wjmo...@gmail.com on July 01, 2012 16:03:28

Labels: -Priority-Low Priority-Medium

[frediy]

From Matthew.Fallshaw on August 02, 2012 23:05:27

Cc: Matthew.Fallshaw