RSS feeds without item publication dates show in reverse order

Hey Madeleine,

We're not able to see the issue that you're reporting here:  embedded RSS feeds have always had their posts always been ordered from newest to oldest.  Perhaps the feed itself is reporting invalid data?

If you can give me the URL for the feed that you've been experiencing this with, I can take a look at it for you.

Thanks for looking into this Joe.

I've tried it with various feeds. Here are two of them

http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/newsRSS.aspx

http://www.jrf.org.uk/rss/reports.xml.asp

Also the date that appears next to the headline is the date it is collected by the Groupsite, rather than the date it was posted on the rss feed.

Many thanks

Madeleine

No problem at all.  Here's what I've discovered:

• The first feed you've listed uses a field name for the publication date that we've not seen before - I've added this field name to our list now.


• The second feed you've listed does not include any publication date on it's entries.  There is nothing that we can do about this fact - but we will try to find a way to work around overly simplistic feeds that do not include publication dates on their entries.

Madeleine,

Feeds without any publication dates on their entries will now be added in the order they were received from the feed.  Hopefully this resolves all of the issues you were having with feeds.  Also, in the interest of clarity, no publication date will be shown on a feed entry that does not have one (previously, it would've shown the date that it was refreshed into the system).  If there ever comes a time where some feed out there mixes and matches entries with and without publication dates, the result will likely be out-of-order.  Really, there is no good reason for a feed to do that, so I don't think it's likely to be a real issue.

Thanks so much Joe for resolving this one.  I think you've come up with a good solution that covers all reasonable eventualities.