Incorrect date shows after import

Support
1

I have searched and this issue was asked about three times before with no answers provided.

We imported our forums to Discourse on September 5th, 2020 and the posts that were imported show that exact date of the import and not the actual date the post was created by the publisher.

This annoys people who think they are viewing the most recent post on a topic- since it shows in Google as September 5th, 2020. Then they find out it’s actually a post from say 2017.

Please, can someone answer? This affects almost 13,000 posts in Google and it is wreaking havoc on our SEO ranking on Google. Thank you.

1 Like
2

Does the issue specifically affect Google or does it also happen in Bing (and other search engines that are powered by it)?

3

It does. The date shows as Sept. 5th in Bing which is the date we switched our forums to Discourse. It also happens in Safari.

Do you think this would work?

  1. We search through the database, capture all the fields that have a dateModified of our migration
  2. Capture all the datePublished of those posts
  3. Set the dateModified to equal the datePublished date
4

I don’t think it depends on which web browser you use.

5

No it wouldn’t matter. I think we are going to try and modify it with the steps I posted and I’ll let you know if if worked or not. I appreciate you communicating with me on this thread.

6

The crawler view currently always shows the updated_at field of posts when it was updated since the post was created. That feels wrong to me and it hurts the most when you have imported posts.

I think we should change it so that we always render the created_at field of posts. That’s more in line with how the rest of Discourse presents post dates. I’ve created a PR:

5 Likes
7

Okay, I wish you good luck! Make sure to share the results with us once they’re in!

8

Thank you so much, i really appreciate it.

1 Like
9

@cassidy The PR has been merged. Please update your forum and give it a try. I’m pretty sure it will fix your problems.

10

Cool! We’ll give it a try asap and I’ll let you know. Thanks again for your attention to this!