Last edit: 1970

Leaving aside the rejection of the photo, what do you think of the date of the last edition?

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in computer science, it’s common to store dates in “unix time” which is the number of millisecond since midnight January 1 1970. if no value is found then that zero value is used instead. I was hoping the team would do something different in this case but they haven’t.

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This photo was submitted 2020-10-11. Computers store dates as year-month-date so it’s sortable. (Same as writing our numbers as: thousands, then hundreds, then tens, then ones. List things biggest to smallest. Makes them sortable.)
So, your 10-11 resolves to October eleventh.

1970 is just part of the wayspot title. Are you saying the building looks a lot older than that?

Half of my edits are displayed with “last modified” date 14/09/2022, which is probably another milestone similar to unix time, or a bug.

What’s even more strange, recent accepted photo edits show that last modified date, i.e. portal was definitely modified after the date displayed as “last modified”.

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Yeah, takes me back to the days of using SAS for analytics (omg I miss it). All dates were really just a number referencing time elapsed since 1/1/1970 with a format over the top so a human could read them

Definitely looks like a default for “this hasnt been modified yet”. Even if it has… because, well, why would the last modified date be accurate anyway?

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Looks like a quick update of the page to remove last modified date till it can be fixed might be handy :sweat_smile:

“1970” is not a part of the title. The wayspot title is “Casa Lopez Font”. The point in question here is of the odd dating of the last edit; which is “1 ene. 1970” (a.k.a “1 Enero 1970”). That is an odd date to see, but @tehstone is correct on the unix time/milliseconds point. My best guess is somehow the timestamp must’ve been stored incorrectly on the backend server, so it either was saved as a 0 value in the database, or something else is wrong and it is defaulting to the 0 when serving the timestamp from the database as a way to account for the issue.

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The last modified date is the date Niantic last modified it, not the date that the community last modified it. The text is incorrect.

(This field used to change after community modifications back in the OPR era but not any more)

Based on research I did last year, here is what affects that value:

Generates an ‘Update’ Timestamp

  • Live → Retired
  • Retired → Live
  • Description change via forum appeal
  • Title change via forum appeal
  • Location edit via help chat
  • Niantic changing a photo (e.g. photo removals)
  • COTW imports
  • App Provisional → Rejected/Duplicate

Does not generate an ‘Update’ Timestamp

  • Wayspots accepted by community (including app submissions)
  • Photo accepted by community
  • Description edit accepted by community
  • Title edit accepted by community
  • Location edit accepted by community
  • Niantic accepting an appeal

If none of the things that ‘generate’ a last updated timestamp have occurred, it will say 1970.

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:exploding_head:

Does not explain why 14/09/2022 is displayed on half of my edits, perhaps it was the switch between lightship and ingress db, or my browser displays this date instead of unix zero date :person_shrugging:

That must be the last time Niantic made a change.

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I also have many Wayspots with the Sept 14th, 2022 last modified date on them, mostly on title/description/location edits still in queue/in voting. Interestingly, photo submissions don’t have an updated last modified date if the photo has been accepted, such as this one:

I have found that if any edit was appealed and the appeal was accepted, it has a date around the time of Niantic making the change. I had title and description edits rejected by the community at the beginning of Janurary 2024 (I submitted them in Sept 2023). I appealed the rejections, Niantic approved my appeals, and the last modified date for both is Jan 19, 2024.

So, it seems as though there was some update done on Sept 14th, 2022 for the titles, descriptions, and locations. Photos are listed as submissions, not edits, so it looks like Niantic doesn’t consider adding a photo to a Wayspot as an edit, thus they don’t consider them as modifying the Wayspot.

Yes, it’s confusing, but this is also new, and there most likely wil be fixes over time.

It essentially means an Unix epoch time value of zero as stated in the first reply. This means January 1, 1970 at midnight UTC.

This most likely means there’s no data for the value and the value of 0 is used in place when it’s a null value. I wouldn’t worry about it as it looks to be not accepted.

I wonder if that’s when Niantic Wayfarer started doing appeals?