Question thread #124

[pauamma]

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

Comments

[misbegotten]

I don't actually know what a dev-related question is, but I will ask in the hope that this is:

Is it possible to fix it so we can do back-dated entries in community journals?

[denise]

It is not technically possible, no. (There's an explanation for this but it's long and boring and very very technical: the very short version is that entry dating works much differently in communities than in personal journals to accomodate the fact there are going to be posts from multiple timezones.) You can change the date and time to be whatever you want it to be for the archive, but it will always display on reading pages in the order the entries were posted and you can't keep them from showing on reading pages the way backdating an entry in a personal journal does.

[misbegotten]

Thank you for the explanation! It is frustrating not to be able to change the display in "community" journals that are actually being used in ways other than for community posts, but that makes perfect sense.

And thank you also for providing enough detail to make the "no" understandable. I like to know how things work, even if I don't have technical expertise.

[denise]

Yeah, it's deeply annoying that the behavior has to be inconsistent between comms and personal journals, but timestamps/chronological display is actually one of those computing problems that look deceptively easy when you first think about it and then turns out to actually be a vast, incomprehensible eldritch horror lurking in the depths to devour programmers' sanity when you dig into it a bit more. (If you want to read up on 'why' a little bit, the best explanation that gets into just the basics in an accessible way is "UTC Is Enough For Everyone, Right?" and spoiler alert: the answer is 'no, no it is not'. And that's just the overview.) There is a very, very good reason why we don't try to translate the timestamps of posts into the viewer's time zone, let's just say. (Timestamps on comments we can kind of do. Timestamps on posts: absolutely not, and I cry just thinking about it.)

Like I said, you can at least change the date/time on community entries so they sort properly in the archives! But yeah, the fact community posts can come from anywhere in the world in a rapid back-and-forth means that we have to treat them differently, timestamp-and-sorting wise, than we do entries in personal journals.

Accurately displaying "when a thing happened" is one of the hardest problems in computer science by far and it's not even close. It's not even much of a technical issue so much as the way we try to shoehorn the passing of linear time into a coherent description/identification system really is that messed up.

[misbegotten]

>>the way we try to shoehorn the passing of linear time into a coherent description/identification system really is that messed up.<<

Ha! I am obligated to use my spiffy Dreamwidth/Doctor Who icon made by seleneheart at this point.

Thank you for the reference! I will enjoy reading it, even if it just makes my head hurt.