Past-date scheduled posts bug?

I experienced a bug with scheduled posting last night.

This is on web. And outside of cross-posting. Just a hosted-only post.

I drafted a post with a scheduled date earlier than today. I chose 1st Jan 2025. For no particular reason.

Anyway. I drafted the post. Was in and out of it. Saving my progress.

Each time I went back in the post, the scheduled date had been removed. The Bluesky check mark kept being re-checked too.

Anyway. When I was ready to publish, I checked the date and entered what I wanted. And hit publish.

The date was definitely reading as I wanted. (Because I was paranoid about it.)

However. The post was published with today’s (24 Jan) date. :frowning:

I had to go in and edit the date after the fact.

The new date went in ok. And the post seemed to have been moved to a new URL.

But it appears the post exists twice on the server. Because the post in my RSS feed linked through to a live post dated 24 Jan as well. I thought it might be my browser cache or something like that. But I seem to confirm it on another device too.

In my archive, only one post is showing, on the correct date.

Is this expected behaviour, or a bug?


I’ve just done a full rebuild and it seems to have removed the original post and the correct one remains. (But my custom CSS was broken after the rebuild, I fixed it by going into the Custom CSS page and hitting Update).


Anyway. I was not expecting this. And I would like to be able to add past-date posts without having to edit the date after the fact. Or rebuild.

I remember having an issue with future-dated posts a little while back but I was never sure if it was user error or a bug.

This time I’m 1000000% sure the date was in there when I hit publish.

I think post scheduling is treated more like a queue of when to build it and not a publish date, as of right now. So it’s like “once this date happens, go ahead and build the site and move from draft to real”. I don’t think there’s actually an alterable “publish date” that considers backdating right now. Hugo does support this, though I think it might be pretty funky for Micro.blog since it opens up a lot of questions (solvable, but would need to make good decisions that are clear to folks) such as:

  1. Do you put a back dated posted in the timeline? If so, where?
  2. Do you publish it in RSS today for people to read? Or do you back date it in there and hope RSS readers scan to dates before the last “seen” post?
  3. Does it cross post?
1 Like

Right. Ok.

I’m a bit confused by this. About a year ago I imported a few posts from another service, but I just did it manually by writing new posts. I wish I could remember how back-dating worked for me back then. Maybe I didn’t care about it.

I realise I can import in various ways. But I just wanted to use the editor.

Thanks for responding. I wonder if @manton can give an answer on how it’s supposed to work.

Is it best to import past-dated posts? And not use the editor?

Yeah – I’m speculating versus observed behavior.

I think that importing works through a different pipeline, because that system expects to get a mass of old posts. So at least if you’re doing a chunk of back dating, that may work closer to how you expect?

Definitely an area for improvement.

1 Like

Thanks y’all for talking through this. It is a little weird because the date field was mostly intended to schedule posts, but backdating should work too. Sounds like it’s either not working at all or sometimes resetting the date. I will fix that.

If you only have the occasional post to backdate, I want the editor to be a good experience. If you have more than a few posts to import, using one of the import file formats (probably Markdown folder) will also do the right thing more quickly.

For completeness, yes, scheduled posts are just posts with a date in the future. When Hugo builds your site, it ignores those posts. Separately from Hugo, Micro.blog sets a scheduled task of its own, to publish your blog when the date hits, at which point Hugo will see the date is no longer in the future and the post will go out.

Drafts are different and not processed by Hugo at all. They stay within Micro.blog’s own database.

Usually no one should have to think about these details when things are working smoothly. Maybe it helps a little in the meantime, though.

1 Like

It just occurred to me that working on a draft and then publishing it with a backdate may be the issue, because Micro.blog sees you’re going from a draft to a published post and so bumps the date to today.

1 Like

Ah. That makes sense. Drafts generally start with when you start them. And generally assume that when you publish that’s when the post is “real” and I could see that resetting.

1 Like

Thanks both. Good to know.

I think it’s fairly normal for blog software to respect whatever date you enter (if you can do that) and either publish to that back-date, immediately, or schedule to a future date. At least, that’s my expectation.

Thanks