[Bug] Anybody else getting notifications for newly published but actually old blog posts?

[BaerbelWinkler]

As it happened a second time today and because I didn't find a question about it yet, I decided to start a thread about it.

Yesterday, I had this notification show up in my inbox:

As this looked interesting, I followed the link, only to the notice that dj.adams.sap had published the blog post in 2009!

It happened again today with this notification where the "Former Member" made me suspicious right away:

In this case the linked to not really new blog post is from 2013:

It doesn't seem to just affect me as daniel.wroblewski added a comment to DJ's old blog post also referring to a notification he received.

Cheers

Bärbel

[Sriprasadsbhat]

Hello Barbel,

Yes I have received the same and tried to find out what was changed.Unfortunately nothing was changed in the blog content.

Regards,

Sriprasad Shivaram Bhat

[VeselinaPeykova]

I have seen something similar for the Q&A part of the site - e.g. a member who has not been active for a really long time appeared in my Activity Stream as posting answers. The answers are, of course, really old (posted several years ago).

I think that this happens when a moderator updates the content, modifies tags, etc.

[ANKIT_CHAUHAN]

Hello Bärbel,

I also got the notification on Wednesday, August 19, 2020 for the blog by DJ Adams.

Kind regards,

ANKIT CHAUHAN

[claudiapacheco]

Apologies for the inconvenience, we'll take a look into it.

[ErvinSzolke]

Hi Bärbel,

Yes, I had the same, exactly with DJ’s blog.

Cheers,

Ervin

[qmacro · Accepted solution]

Hi Baerbel, with respect to the old blog post of mine (in my former id dj.adams, not dj.adams.sap), there's an explanation.

It's because in preparing to reply to a tweet (it was this reply, eventually: https://twitter.com/qmacro/status/1295971553285410816) I was going to refer to this blog post (One way of dealing with #blogtheft from SDN – through images), but had noticed that in the transfer from the old system, it had some slightly mangled content, so I fixed it. But I was also required to specify a blog post category (which, being an old post, it didn't have) and a new primary tag (because the old one wasn't valid). I guess this might have triggered the alert.

cheers

dj

[BaerbelWinkler · Accepted solution]

Hi DJ,

thanks for the most likely explanation. I guess that such a change shouldn't really trigger a notification of "new blog post published". It seems as if an additional check - e.g. for the original date of publication being in the past - would easily prevent it from getting triggered.

Cheers

Baerbel

[BorisZarske · Accepted solution]

Hi DJ,

I can also confirm this behavior - I also update some of my blogs from time to time (such as after the GA of one of the services described in there). Recently, in several cases, a notification came up about outdated tags that had been assigned to the initial blog post, which has to be fixed in order to be able to save. And this seems to trigger the "new blog post" notification, which just does not make sense. Maybe, it could be an option to trigger some kind of "existing blog post updated" notification in such cases instead?

Thanks,
Boris

[audreystevenson · Accepted solution]

IIRC, if you change the primary tag, people following that new tag would not be made aware of the post at all if it doesn't get "new blog post" notification. It's one of the challenges of trying to keep the number of notification types reasonable while still trying to send the right kind of notification. I know the team's looking at it again now for possible improvements.