So I am interested in knowing if the date of a particular post I am reading has been changed.
Is that possible to know or not? I am concerned for example that the author posted it on the 17th but the date of post seems to be 16th. Can wordpress posts even have their dates changed?
Yes the dates can be changed, and no I don’t think the external user wouldn’t be able to tell unless you had a copy from before.
Add `/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/1` to the URL where 1 is the ID of the post.
The dates might give you some insight (modified date). In the post below I set the publication date to 1977 but the modified date shows when it was actually posted.
`{`
`”id”: 17,`
`”date”: “1977-01-01T15:44:00″,`
`”date_gmt”: “1977-01-01T15:44:00″,`
`”guid”: {`
`”rendered”: “http://importexport.local/?p=17″`
`},`
`”modified”: “2023-09-17T15:45:01″,`
`”modified_gmt”: “2023-09-17T15:45:01″,`
`”slug”: “backdated-post”,`
`”status”: “publish”,`
`”type”: “post”,`
`”link”: “http://importexport.local/backdated-post/”,`
`”title”: {`
`”rendered”: “Backdated Post”`
`},`
I use a free/paid WordPress plugin named **WordProof**. When you publish a post, it calculates the **hash value** of the post and records it with a **timestamp** permanently on the **blockchain**.
If you change any part of the post and re-publish it, it wil generate a new hash value and record a new blockchain timestamp with a later date/time. So, the revision history of the post is **verifiable** by checking the attached blockchain timestamp certificates.
This helps to provide copyright protection because I can prove with electronic blockchain evidence when I published my content and the hash value of the content. I can prove when I published my original content, and the copycat who stole my content published it at a later date.
WordProof is free for low-volume publishers.
What’s the purpose of this inquiry?
There’s no way you can tell about the date of publication if a different date is set in WordPress. If it’s an old post, you can try checking archives.org to see if old versions exist.
You will need some custom coding to prevent publication of articles with an old date or any other date other than what server says.