[jhmattern]

I need to be able to schedule topics in advance. For example, I might come up with an idea and draft a topic at 11pm on Sunday night, and I might want it to go live at 9am on Monday morning.

That’s no problem. I just create the topic in the admin area and use WP’s built-in scheduling feature. The topic goes live on the forum at 9am the next day as expected.

The problem, though, is that the freshness in BBPress doesn’t reflect this. At 9:30am, for example, it should show a freshness of 30 min ago for that topic. But instead, it’s showing 10 hours ago — based on the time the draft was scheduled rather than the actual scheduled publication time.

This is a particular problem when I need to schedule a week’s worth of new topics at once (to keep a growing community regularly updated with new discussion points). They all show that they have similar freshness when people view the main forum or category pages, instead of showing that content is being published at regular intervals.

Is there anything I can do to fix this so BBPress reflects actual publication time (like WP does in general) instead of relying on the time the topics were physically edited?

[Robkk]

If the topic has any new replies to it, the Fresness time changes when any new replies are posted. Freshness time is basically tells you the time when the Last Post was posted, not the published date.

To see the published date, go into the topic and toward the top-left of the topic by the labels Author and Posts you should see the published date.

But if the topic did have no replies, and also shows the wrong time, then I might need to report as a bug/do testing to duplicate the issue.

[jhmattern]

I noticed the problem before any replies were posted to the two threads I tested with. So I’m not sure yet if the freshness is correct for later replies. But it’s definitely off for the original post. Instead of the original freshness time being based on the time the topic is actually posted, it’s based on when the topic was saved on the back end. So it’s making new topics look older than they actually are on the public side.

[Robkk]

Yeah I saw the Freshness time add up in the backend of WordPress. You might not be able to schedule topics without this happening for now. I do not know if this was really set as a feature for bbPress honestly, I think an update in WordPress adding this option and maybe bbPress hasn’t removed it on their end or fixed any issues.

[jhmattern]

Thanks for looking into it. Unfortunately I can’t use this feature (which is important) if there are going to be errors in the dates. It risks alienating new members by making topics look dated when they’re brand new. I’ll have to have my dev look into it and see if he can figure something out to get this working correctly. Thanks again.