Can I change the date a site was archived

Archive Web.Page stores the date and time when a website is archived and displays it in the “Date” column. I’m wondering if there’s a way to modify that date.

The reason I’d like to do this is that I archived multiple Facebook posts from different dates on the same day. As a result, the system currently displays the same date with different times for various posts in the View Page UI. It would be ideal if I could change the archived date to reflect the original posting date of each Facebook post, allowing users to know the date of the post before they click to view the archived content.

Is there a way to accomplish this?

Thank you for your guidance!

The date shown is the date a site was archived, not the date the content was created - that’s an important distinction! If you want to be able to navigate through the collection by content creation date, you could use Conifer to annotate the captured pages?

This is not achievable with Webrecorder’s tools at this time (with the exception of WARCIT but that’s a bit of a different tool). The date of a snapshot is always the date of archiving.

There’s been some discussion of adding an additional date field within Browsertrix, though it is still an open question if it should be done at the archived item level, or — as you’ve brought up here — at the snapshot level! … Or maybe both! I would encourage you to join the discussion over there if you have a moment to copy over your use case :slight_smile:

Thanks, Hank. I have added my use case to [Feature]: Add date of event being archived · Issue #1808 · webrecorder/browsertrix · GitHub.

BYW, how can I use WARCIT to change the date a site being archived?

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Thanks for noting that in the GitHub issue!

WARCIT creates a WARC file out of a directory — say you have a local copy of a website in a folder. You can set the date you want to appear when you convert the folder into a web archive using the -d YYYYMMDDHHMMSS command line flag. If you don’t do this, WARCIT will use the modification date of the files.

WARCIT will not allow you to change the date of a page in an already existing WARC file.

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