Embedding comments in old content creates "today" posts

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Embedding comments in old content creates “today” posts

Discourse user billgraziano is experiencing an issue with old blog posts being imported into Discourse, resulting in them being marked as having been created recently, rather than on their original date. This is due to the fact that the initial topics for each post are created without retrieving the original post date, which is often present in the post content and URL.

billgraziano suggests that Discourse could retrieve the original post date when importing comments. In the meantime, he is manually updating timestamps for the affected posts.

codinghorror mentions a potential solution to prevent this issue, where the associated comment topic is only created when a visitor explicitly clicks a button. codinghorror later confirms that this setting is now in place for embedded comment discussions.

1

I have Discourse hosting the comments for my blog. It mostly works OK except for old posts. Apparently many of those older posts don’t have topics created yet. Or haven’t been crawled. I’m unclear on the exact process that is creating the initial topics for each post.

Here’s a post from 2004 that Discourse thinks was made five days ago: (removed) EDIT: I just updated that post manually so here’s one I haven’t edited: SQL Server Links – 8 Dec 2009 - Blog Comments - SQLTeam.com Forums

Could Discourse go back and find the date of the original post when it imports? It’s in the post in many, many places. And the URL.

I’m going to start manually updating timestamps for the obvious ones. But I fear it hasn’t found all of them.

Note: I also just changed it to import from the RSS feed. I’m not sure if that will impact this.

2

One thing we’ve talked about, and I probably want to do, is not create the associated comment topic until a visitor explicitly clicks a button. That’d prevent some of the “set up Discourse comments, 800 new discussion topics were created going back to 2006” problems we’ve seen.

4

I believe this setting is now in place for embedded comment discussions.