Geeks that know about RSS version(s) may already have thought about what should happen to the post date of an yet published item: don't think more about it - keep it as it is!

Why? This provide some kind of "permanent" web page(s) - the same thing as we want to have with the permaLinks of posts.

And here is the other reason. Ian Hickson posted an update of the state of the WHAT Working Group. BitWorking referred to it in his post 3270 Redux from June, 6th 2004 as I did just some words before. Now a RSS Bandit user complained about, Ian's feed is not displayed/processed correctly in the list of items. The item post date in the feed source is of 2004-06-29T16:26:32+00:00, but it displays June, 6th 2004! How comes?

This behavior is not a failure in feed parsing/processing. We read the date(s) in correctly, I double verified that. But if you look carefully you will note there are only a few (or at least one) item(s) where the date is "wrong". E.g. "State of WHAT" as of June, 29 2004, but only if you also have subscribed to the BitWorking feed.

I assume here, especially this item is a edited post (as of date above) after it was published (before the date you see in Bandit for that item)^{(see correction note below)}.

As you know we display item relations in threads. So our Relation Cosmos implementation is so smart, it corrects the item date(s) if it detects "invalid" relations from one item to another. So it does for Ian's post with an referrer item posted at June, 6th 2004: this mean, Ian's post must be already published that time, because the referrer has the link to it. So the date of that particular post is "corrected" back to be a few seconds BEFORE the item post date of the referrer post. The time line of posts is now correct again.

Conclusion: leave the item post date unchanged, if you really have to "correct" the posted content of an item! Or a smart software does it for you! (Or even cannot display a time line of posted items in a thread or any other visual representation like ThreadArcs). Or: one can even "migrate" to Atom, that maintains also a changeDate of items if you really need it...

Edited correction: As Dare Obasanjo tolds me, the story was BitWorking edited an old(er) post to contain a link to the newer one (Ian's). But left the post date unchanged (as I suggested). How common ist that? What do you think? As it is somewhat unclear what item post date we had to correct, we will left it untouched in the future... :~