Changing timestamp of topic replies - Easier way?

Support
1

I see that there’s now a way to change the topic’s timestamp through the UI and that it does a relative timestamp update for all following posts. That’s awesome!

However, I’m looking for a way to specify a timestamp for replies WITHIN a topic. I’m wanting to do an archival/restoration project for an old forum that’s since been deleted and will be manually pulling post text from Archive.org. Having to muck around in the CLI is going to make using Discourse unfeasible.

Is there any way to extend that functionality to subsequent replies within a topic, or at least a way to make mucking around in the CLI not such a tedious project? Hoping there’s something easier than the last time I checked: Editing post date?

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2

Sounds like what you need is an importer that will maintain the time stamps.

3

No, the content is being brought over manually from Archive.org - There’s nothing to import.

What I’m hoping for is a plugin or something to add the date change UI that already exists for the first post in the thread to all subsequent replies.

4

I was thinking that code would either import a copy of what is on archive.org or would work from a downloaded copy.

5

Delayed response - we moved across the country!

No, the posts would be copy/pasted over manually as there’s a lot of attachments and a lot of cleanup/reorganizing to do.

What I’m after is a way to change the date of ANY post to ANY date, without it also offsetting the relative date for every other post in the thread.

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7

You’re really going to need to use the command line for this sort of thing.

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8

If you’re doing this manually anyway, you can

  1. add each reply as its own new topic
  2. manually correct its date and time
  3. move the reply to the “existing topic” — that is, make it a reply to the original post

Laborious, but it works.

2 Likes
10

I’ve come across a use case for this too, so following up to gauge the difficulty of enabling post date editing?

I’d imagine adding the same button/function that currently is under the topic’s “wrench” could be mostly replicated for the post’s “wrench”… but I am also still very unfamiliar with the internal magic of discourse so unaware of any complexities this could create.

Erik - Your method works… but is slightly labor intensive at scale!

Thoughts?