dan.bolser wrote:

Here is the exact error message from Google Webmaster Tools:

6680 Invalid date
An invalid date was found. Please fix the date or formatting before resubmitting.

Parent tag: url
Tag: lastmod
Value:

Problem detected on: Jul 3, 2011

Another possibility might be http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GoogleNewsSitemap

Dan, can you check what the page_touched values for these rows in the page table are?

Normally this should carry a timestamp, which in MediaWiki on MySQL is stored as a 14-character string (YYYYMMDDHHMMSS). Null or empty *should* end up formatting the current time, though there may be some bad values or such.

dan.bolser wrote:

I debugged this a bit with TimStarling, but the results are still a bit confusing.

It seems that MediaWiki is corrupting the page_touched field!

I recently imported the data for this wiki from MW 1.11 (using MySQL dump 10.13 Distrib 5.1.56) into MW 1.17 (using MySQL 4.1.22-standard-log). Since that import, I touched a couple of pages (guess which?) and discovered this problem with the site map.

Since reporting the two problem pages, I ran a process that touched many pages, and here is the state of the page_touched field:

mysql> select page_touched, count(*) from mb_page group by page_touched limit 20;
+----------------+----------+

+----------------+----------+

+----------------+----------+
17 rows in set (0.01 sec)

With help from TimStarling, I checked the data in my import 'dump' file, and concluded that it looks fine. I re-imported the dump, and it looked fine in the database (no 'corruption' like the above). I then followed the 1.17 DB update procedure (first using the GUI and then again using the CLI), and both looked fine (no corruption).

Then I 'recovered' the correct page_touched field using the update (to keep my changes post import).

Then I edited a page, and saw the same corruption!

Before edit:

mysql> select * from mb_page where page_title = "Main_Page";
+---------+----------------+------------+-------------------+--------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+----------+

+---------+----------------+------------+-------------------+--------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+----------+

+---------+----------------+------------+-------------------+--------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+----------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)

After edit:

mysql> select * from mb_page where page_title = "Main_Page";
+---------+----------------+------------+-------------------+--------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+----------+

+---------+----------------+------------+-------------------+--------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+----------+

+---------+----------------+------------+-------------------+--------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+----------+
2 rows in set (0.02 sec)

As I said, in the interim I had touched many pages. Going to Google Webmaster Tools, I now see many errors!

Seems pretty clear, now that I've set it out, that MW 1.17 (+ extensions) is borking the page_touched field on this version of MySQL, leading to an error in the sitemap.

Dan: Is this still a problem?
If so, which MW version do you use nowadays?