I have yet to identify why, but I see that quite a few private /msgs have had their timestamps altered in somewhat chaotic but not drastic ways (based on the minimal evidence I've reviewed so far). I am looking into the problem but wanted to announce this immediately as people may notice somewhat strange behavior such as some places that display your messages displaying them in a different order than they were before or, some of you with much better memory than I might even notice that the timestamp displayed when you hover over the name of the other user who sent/received the message no longer reflects when the message was originally sent.

There were a few reports that at least hinted that this might be happening when a /msg is moved into a different folder. I'm pretty sure I had it happen to at least two messages of mine (earlier today) that I have never moved.

Also, any gods who might have been doing maintenance that could have impacted private /msgs should speak up either here or in private channels.

- tye        

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Re: Private /msg timestamps on the move (fixed)
by tye (Sage) on May 13, 2009 at 19:04 UTC

    This should be fixed now.

    After some time passed, I realized that jdporter almost certainly had it correct. The timestamp changes when some process modifies a message, most likely when a message moves to a new folder. I saw the timestamp on some of my messages change when the sender's folder changed.

    I found the one case of code that modifies private messages w/o forcing MySQL to preserve the existing timestamp and fixed it. This bug would have been triggered whenever anybody used Message Inbox to move messages into a new folder. In other words, timestamps on messages prior to today are rampantly wrong. Sorry.

    - tye