gavinmac wrote: ↑Sat Dec 05, 2020 10:56 pm
Do many forums (including K440) have this kind of plug in?
I am not aware of any other site that does this besides CEO. For what it's worth I've spent significant time around this kind of technology.
It is very difficult to estimate the popularity of third party plugins because there is no reliable method to find how many sites have it installed.
3 people "follow" the project on Github, meaning that anytime that changes are made 3 people are notified. 1 of those 3 is the original developer of the plugin himself, a guy who calls himself javiexin.
It was
first published on May 5, 2015, and the last change made by its developer was on
January 22, 2017. It is not actively maintained and in the last change by its original developer he added support for phpBB version 3.2. It was originally written for
phpBB version 3.1.
CEO currently
uses phpBB version 3.3.2, but the latest version supported by the plugin is 3.1. This discrepancy means one of two things:
1) The plugin works on 3.3.2 as well because versions after 3.1 don't introduce any changes that breaks the plugin functionality.
2) The plugin has been customized by CEO's developers to work on later versions of phpBB.
Option 1 is impossible to find out without testing it.
Option 2 is likely because CEO has other customizations made to plugins installed on their site and their developers have thus shown to have the necessary knowledge to do so, if they wanted (were paid) to. For example CEO is running a heavily customized version of the
phpBB-Reputation-System plugin that provides their karma/reputation functionality. The threshold to customize the chgposttime plugin is lower than the customizations that they have applied to the phpBB-Reputation-System plugin.
The latest change made to the phpBB-Reputation-System plugin by the official developer was on
November 16, 2014, and at the time it only officially supported phpBB versions 3.0.x and 3.1.x was in progress and at the time being tested.
In order to make it work on phpBB version 3.3.2, the developers hired by CEO had to make customizations to the plugin, diverting from the official development which ended 6 years ago.
Besides the obvious that CEO has customized the reputation plugin to work on the software version they currently use there are many superficial differences to the plugin. By looking at the official plugin source code from 2014 and comparing it to the functionality that it provides for CEO on their site, it is obvious that they have spent much time on customizations for that particular plugin.
To summarize all this we can shortly conclude that CEO makes customizations to publicly available plugins and it is therefore likely that they would customize the post time changer plugin if they wanted to maintain its functionality despite it being officially unmaintained since 2017.
Websites generally don't keep plugins from 2017 installed unless they provide some kind of functionality. The fact that CEO has it installed indicates by itself that it works and they use it to do the only thing that it was made to do: change the time of posts.
gavinmac wrote: ↑Sat Dec 05, 2020 10:56 pm
Does the plugin allow GONK to change the hidden Google search result date to July 5 while the CEO thread is still dated July 10?
Having audited the chgposttime plugin I can say that it provides very primitive functionality. The short explanation is that it
overwrites a post's timestamp.
When used out of the box it will display the same date and time to any visitor regardless if they are human or a search engine crawler.
But... To make it use a separate value for search engines all the CEO developers need to do is change one line in one file. Changing one line in the plugin would make the modified timestamp be written to a separate date and time field for post entries in the database. CEO developers would then only need to display the separate date and time value in templates and its RSS feed. To create the necessary condition to display the alternative timestamp to search engines is child's play at this point.
It is of course impossible to know for sure without gaining access and auditing the exact version of CEO's source code that they have in production. I believe this is what you lawyers call
strong indicia?
1. Results in Google searches indicate that CEO is providing incorrect timestamps to Google.
2. A plugin that hasn't been updated since 2017 is in use, most likely customized to create the forementioned behavior.
3. CEO developers are capable to implement the required customization.
4. CEO developers habitually implement customizations to meet Gonk's requirements.
5. A plugin from 2014 is in use and proven to be modified.
6. A plugin that hasn't been updated since 2017 is in use, most likely customized to create the behavior in #1.