Site RSS Feed, Article Publication Dates Broken

[Mousit]

I've noticed an issue with the MacRumors main site RSS feed ( https://feeds.macrumors.com/MacRumors-All ). It began a few days ago, but I didn't pay attention to exactly when it started. Wednesday (July 15), Thursday (16th)? Recent.

Basically, the post/publication date of EVERY article contained within the RSS feed (specifically, the <pubDate> entry) is now populated with whatever time it is at the exact moment the RSS feed is accessed by a client, instead of when the article was actually published. I can even open the XML feed directly in my browser, and see the timestamp for EVERY article as the moment I loaded the page in that browser. I wait 60 seconds, hit refresh. Timestamp for EVERY article updates again, to the exact time it is when I hit refresh.

This renders the RSS feed more or less useless, because every article now has the same timestamp and unless I want to carefully walk through all 50 articles (roughly where the feed rolls off articles) every single time I check the RSS feed, I'm not going to notice any new posts since they're all dated the same so they're all intermingled. And that date changes every time the feed is accessed, so any RSS client will also see all 50 articles as brand new, just-posted articles. New ones do not get marked because as far as the client is concerned, seeing that pubDate, they're ALL new. Every time.


Anyone else noticed this problem? Am I the only one still using RSS feeds to get my MR updates? I figured I'd post here in the Site Discussion section of the forum as I didn't immediately see somewhere I could e-mail someone who might be in the MR technical team that handles the RSS feed. Maybe it'll get seen here or someone will know who to tag. Or can tell me where to send an e-mail.

 

[arn]

Looking into this

 

[Apple_Robert]

I just checked the feed in my Feedly app and it appears to be working as it should. My feed is "Mac News and Rumors".

 

[Nermal]

I'm seeing the same problem as Mousit. The pubDate element is showing the current date ("Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:11:36 PDT" at this moment) instead of the actual publication date.

I wonder whether Feedly is using some sort of smarts to determine the age of the article, as the correct publication dates don't seem to appear in the feed at all.

Edit: Now that I'm looking more closely, that's actually three hours earlier than the current time!

 

[Mousit]

@Apple_Robert @Nermal I would assume Feedly processes the feed differently than the clients Nermal and I are using. The pubDate is what mine keys off of. Before I made my initial post, I'd reviewed some of my other feeds from other websites--ones that are working properly in my client--that use the exact same RSS format that MR does and confirmed that pubDate for those sites shows the date the article was published. And also that it does not change every time I refresh the page, the way MR's feed is doing. So at least in my case, the pubDate entry is definitely what's causing my client's problem.

Also Nermal, nice catch. I'd noticed it was in PDT and I'm in CST, so I seen it was behind as would be expected. However, it didn't click with me that it's more than two hours behind me. Interesting! Though the minutes and seconds are current and match the time I load the feed page, and they also update every time I refresh the page.

 

[chrberni]

Thanks for the bug report. Can you confirm this is now corrected?

 

[Mousit]

@chrberni Yes, the pubDate elements look like they have the correct data that they should, and as one would expect they're also all static now each time I reload the page. My RSS client seems to be happy with the feed now. Thank you!