Re: Antenna Time Machine

As ~slondr pointed out it's possible to post from the future on Antenna 🙂️

And as ruario replied, this hasn't really been a problem.

Why is it Possible?

Antenna accepts RSS, Atom, and gemsub. Here's the thing about gemsub: the exact time of posting is only implied. What does that mean?

As per the specification the exact time is supposedly meant to be interpreted as 12:00 noon on the given date in UTC. This is also why the order of entries may change a bit on the front page, because every gemsub feed entry posted on the same date is set to the exact same posting time. This is also why something posted at 05:00 am UTC can show up as newer than something posted at 07:00 am UTC.

Someone may post something on, say, 04:00 am UTC but have it legitimately dated 8 hours later because the YYYY-MM-DD timestamp is inexact. For that purpose Antenna has to accept submissions dated at least some hours into the future.

People don't generally think in UTC terms. If someone in Australia posts at 23:00 UTC they're unlikely to date that to the day before what their calendar says, no matter what the gemsub specification says. This means Antenna for the sake of usability and kindness should accept times even a bit further into the future.

Antenna translates all times to UTC, and that also means that a reader in Fiji can look at the listing and see several posts dated a day ahead of their calendar.

The Fix

Nah. I've decided to just not fix it. Mostly the future dated posts are by mistake, and it's often better to show them so that the publisher can go "Oops!" than to hide them and make the publisher follow red herrings in their quest to figure out why their posts aren't shown.

And slondr: your post is correctly dated now, at least if the posting time you mentioned was in UTC 😉️

-- CC0 ew0k, 2022-09-07