So, when I link to one of my reviews, there's a date in the upper right corner of the review. For example, my most recent one:
January 14th, 2012. Perfectly acceptable, considering that's the day I finished the book, and that's the day I posted the review. All is right with the world.
Now, here's the thing that bothers me . . . well, it's really twofold. I have lots and lots of books that I've rated, but didn't actually write a review for. I always make it a point to do a review if I rate a book 1-star or 5-stars; I feel like those extremes deserve some sort of personal explanation. But for others . . . sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. My goal is to eventually have reviews for every book (I think I mentioned that not too long ago). And I've actually made pretty good progress on that goal over the past week or so. Not sure why, just felt like getting it done.
So, here's a random review that I entered sometime in the last couple days:
December 30, 2011. As you can see that's not the date I finished it, but that's the date I added it to my shelves. I'm not even going to bother trying to explain why, just accept that it's a weird thing I do, deleting and then re-adding all my books from the previous year, so they all have the same "date added" in the database. It's bizarre. It doesn't make any sense. Get over it. I upload the data from an Excel file, so it's not like I'm doing the whole thing manually . . . if that helps in any way to make me sound less like a psycho . . . though I'm not really holding out hope.
So anyway. This review, despite the fact that I just added the text of the review a couple days ago, has held onto the original date it was added. This is what it had always done in the past, at least as far as I had ever noticed. And, as you may be able to guess from the previous paragraph, this is the sort of thing that matters to me even though it shouldn't. So imagine my distress when I discovered this:
January 15, 2012. Which is, of course, the date I made the change. So . . . yeah, what's up with that? And this wasn't even me adding a review, this was me just editing one that was already there! I'd realized I'd forgotten the "First Reads winner" part, which is important for some reason . . . I guess people have a right to know that I received the book for free when deciding whether or not to listen to my opinion. *shrug*
So, maybe it's because I edited a review, instead of adding one where there was nothing before? But either way, I'm editing a previously existing "file." But then I discovered other examples of editing a field, rather than adding something to nothing, resulting in a date change. For example, when I reread this book last summer, and updated my read count from 2 to 3:
June 29, 2011. So, I thought I had it figured out. Add something where there's nothing, and the date won't change. Edit something that's already there, and the date will change. Fine. I don't like it, but fine. And then here's one that I edited because I realized it had a typo:
December 30, 2011. I swear to you, I just fixed a typo on this one this morning! Admittedly, not a huge change, I only deleted a word, but I still edited the review!
So, as I said before, my problem is twofold. The first is that some reviews seem to be changing the displayed date, and I don't want them to. But the more disturbing thing is that I can't figure out any rhyme or reason to why some are changing and some aren't! Either the date should remain the same no matter what, or it should change any time I make an update. Or, if it's going to be inconsistent, there should at least be some consistency to the inconsistency, no?
I guess my BIGGEST problem is that all of this actually bothers me.
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