The discussion revolves around the issue of the “Last Date Modified” not updating in the sitemap. PoojaPatel reported that the last modified date is not reflecting the correct date of the last edit to a post. codinghorror asked for clarification, and PoojaPatel confirmed that the issue is related to the date of last edit to a post.
codinghorror acknowledged the issue and suggested that the correct date should be used. However, eviltrout pointed out that implementing this change would require additional computation and might not be worth it for crawlers.
Later, codinghorour realized that the bumped_at field should be used instead of last_posted_at, and eviltrout created a pull request to address the issue. The change will update the field if the last post was edited in the topic, but will not account for edits to other posts.
Last Date Modified Not Update in Sitemap. Below URL for example.
Last modified date is 14-12-2020 but in sitemap its shows 23-12-2019.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/configuring-facebook-login-for-discourse/13394
<time itemprop='dateModified' datetime='2020-12-14T21:13:21Z' class='post-time'>
Above URL available in sitemap 3.
What last modified date are you referring to?
Can you please clarify.
date of last edit to a post.
I believe that might be by design at the moment, but I see your point – it is more correct to use the last edit time of the last post in the topic.
@eviltrout if this one is as easy as I suspect it might be, could you assign it?
Looks like it’s currently using our last_posted_at field from the Topic query. There is no last_edited_at field we can use here. It would have to check the posts to find out the most recent time a post was edited.
I feel like this is such a minor issue for crawlers that it’s not worth doing the extra computation.
We realized that bumped_at is the field we should be using here, not last_posted_at, so that change will go into the codebase tomorrow courtesy @eviltrout – thanks for pointing this out @PoojaPatel
I have a PR for this now:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse-sitemap/pull/13
To be clear, this only updates the field if the last post was edited in the topic. If another post is edited the result is the same.