DateTime of posts might be set fraudulently by a pod

I recognized on my pod a post with a daytime set in the future.

It seems that in my diaspora stream this is sorted correctly and visible test is “5 days ago”, but the date is fife days ahead.
(As of writing this its the 15th of June 2022)

Don’t know what’s the reason is, but a date time should not be federated that is obviously in the feature.

Is this an issue for diaspora or federation?

That usually happens, when the sending pod doesn’t have ntp and just has a very wrong server time set. it’s even worse when the wrong time is a lot in the past, because then it appears somewhere very far down in the stream where nobody sees it anymore. There is not a lot we can do against it, because we don’t know when the user wrote the post. The only thing that comes to my mind is that we also store another timestamp on when we received the post, and then order the stream based on that timestamp (which would fix it for wrong timestamps in both directions).

The other thing is probably a frontend bug for whatever converts the absolute timestamp in a relative timestamp which just doesn’t handle future dates properly.

If you know the podmin of the sender you can try to contact them and tell them to fix their server time (best is to use ntp).

1 Like

It turns out, that on my Pod Id have just 2 posts with several days difference (created_at ahead of updated_at), but several thousand posts with just some minutes (due to a lack of timezones?)

This said, thread can be closed.