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View Full Version : FLASH: Einstein wrong! Messages from the future detected!


bramley
09-23-2004, 12:10 PM
The RSS feeds for the forum that Rob has drawn my attention to are great.

I've been trying the RSS2 feeds, with NetNewsWire 1 and the public beta 2.03, and have no problem - except for some funny time stamps.

The time stamping of the posts seems out, and I'm not sure if the issue is with NetNewsWire, or at the forum end with vBulletin. Essentially the xml code for the timestamps looks like:-
<dc:date>2004-09-23T15:48:04-04:00</dc:date>

i.e the post was made at 15:48:04 GMT - 4 hrs or 11:48:04 forum time. But here (British Summer Time +1hr GMT) NetNewsWire displays it as 20:48:04 i.e 5 hours ahead of my actual time! Which is a tad confusing!

The thing is this a problem confined to NetNewsWire, or are all users seeing the same thing I am? i.e is vBulletin not using standard time stamping or is there a bug in NetNewsWire.

If I knew which it is, I could send feedback to Ranchero for NetNewsWire 2.0, or we could persuade Rob to change the stamps to plain GMT (assuming he thinks this is possible.) like this:

<dc:date>2004-09-23T15:48:04+00:00</dc:date>

This seems to work OK here - and I think would work right elsewhere.

Presumeably, anybody in the same timezone as the forum's time zone need not respond as you won't notice any difference. Well, you shouldn't notice a difference. :)

griffman
09-23-2004, 12:42 PM
It's a vBulletin thing; there's some discussion of it on their forum site. Apparently, the dc:date field is RSS2, but not all RSS2 newsreaders are handling it correctly. If you try the RSS1 feed, do you get the right timestamps?

-rob.

bramley
09-23-2004, 01:11 PM
If you try the RSS1 feed, do you get the right timestamps?

-rob.

Yes, I do - but in NewsNetWire RSS2 feeds the timestamp appears in the main window along with the poster's name, whereas in RSS1, the timestamp only appears in the sidebar.

It's just a little more convenient in RSS2 I guess.

I've just noticed the same issue with some Meerkat channels too. They don't seem to be vBulletin.

Seems like the reader simply doesn't understand that there's a minus sign in there. Does sound like a reader issue more than anything - since NetNewsWire is still in beta, I'll give them some feedback.