Timestamps in messages are taken on trust - it's the sequence of messages that matters.

Nice demo of this just now. @elavoie's computer clock must be a few minutes ahead of mine so Patchwork renders his messages as coming from the future. Nice defensive coding @Matt :)

Yeah, this comes up once in a while. It is also a problem that if you post a message from the future, your message will stay at the top of the public feed for a while.

But how do you solve this?

I suppose a simple hack would be to assume that if the message claims to be written (msg.value.timestamp) after the time you received the message (msg.timestamp), assume it is wrong and instead use the receive time instead.

This would be as simple as a Math.min(msg.value.timestamp, msg.timestamp)!

I might give this a go!

That sounds like an elegant solution!

@tim btw, not entirely on trust: timestamps must be increasing, if not those messages are treated as invalid!

Okay, kinda fixed in master!

Goodbye false future posts! You will now bow to the present!

@CustomDesigned

I believe that sbot won't allow you to publish a message with an earlier timestamp. You could trash a feed by posting with a timestamp far in the future (well that is, you'd never be able to come back to the present until the date was reached)!

@customdesigned hmm, @matt is right. If your clock went backwards, the current implementation would just refuse to post that message. You'd have to change the code to send an invalid message...

Thanks for the clarification @Dominic

So would setting the time stamp on a message to say an hour from now be a simple way of implementing a Ulysses contract if you wanted for some reason not to post any messages on SSB for a fixed amount of time (in order to stop prevaricating for example)?

I suppose you could just keep posting from the future to get around it.

@tim that is a great suggestion! I'd actually do that right now (I mean, 3 hours from now) except that hooking up that code probably even be more of a distraction than I am looking for.