Problem with dates/times when using contributors summary macro in Confluence
Asked by Mick Davidson:

![](../../../upfiles/Contributions_Macro_1.jpg)![](../../../upfiles/Contributions_Macro_2.jpg)


Answers:
author: Andrew Frayling
body: Hi Mick,

What parameters are you passing to the macro when you're displaying dates and times? If you're listing more than one page in a single instance of the macro then the last updated date will be the last date any of the pages you're tracking in that instance. If you're tracking the entire space in a single instance of the macro it will show the date when you last updated anything, which would include the page that the contributor macro is on so would be "less than a minute ago" because you just edited it.

For listing the user and the page they edited you can do this by including "edited", "commented", etc. in the list of columns to display. E.g. if you choose to display "lastupdate,edits,edited,comments,commented" this will give you a list of names with the date they last edited something, how many edits they made in total, which pages they edited, how many comments they have made and which pages they have commented on. If you're tracking multiple pages in a single instance what it doesn't do is group data by page so it won't show Joe Bloggs edited the Test page 5 times, the Documentation page 8 times, etc. To do that you would have to have an instance of the macro for each page, with each instance restricted to track just one page.

Another macro you could use for tracking who updated each page and when they updated it would be the Contributors Macro (<http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Contributors+Macro>).

As an aside I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago on how I set up simple community management dashboards in Confluence to track updates (or lack thereof) - <http://blog.networkedcollaboration.com/2012/02/20/confluence-community-management-dashboard/>

Hope that helps?

Andrew.

comments: author: Mick Davidson
body: Andrew,

Thanks for replying. I've attached a couple of graphics showing the parameters I've set up.

I'm tracking a specific space in one instance that has about 22 spaces. There is only one space specified.

The tracking macro is not in the same space as the one being tracked.

I will follow up on the other ideas asap, thanks for those.

And I'll have a look at your blog to - in fact I'll add a permanent link to it from mine - which I published yesterday: <http://davidsonmedia.weebly.com/techno-blog.html>

Cheers.


author: Andrew Frayling
body: Thanks for the link, I've reciprocated.

As you're tracking all the content of a Space in a single instance of the macro I believe the last updated date is behaving as I described - it displays the date of the last time you updated anything in the Space that the macro is tracking. To track the last time someone updated a single page you'd need separate instances of the macro with each one configured to track a single page - which may or may not be workable for you depending on the number of pages in each Space and how prolific new page creation is, i.e. if people are creating lots of pages all the time it's going to be near impossible to keep track of them.


author: Mick Davidson
body: Andrew,

thanks, your blog looks very interesting, I'll have a go at setting that up.

The last updated date is doing this for me and several other users, and I know that we can't all be updating things at the moment, mainly because it's very unlikely we're all logged on at the same time.

I'm only really interested in monitoring a space as a whole, I only need an overview of what's going on so that I can definitely see what clients are editing. I know you can see this in the dashboard, but that doesn't display the info as I'd like to see it.

Cheers.


author: Andrew Frayling
body: Hi Mick,

Can you and the other users not touch anything for 10 minutes or so, or ask them to leave everything alone over a lunch break? Just to see if the last updated date is updating. There will be some caching going on with the updated date, but after a few minutes the caches should all be up to date. I set up an instance of the macro using exactly the same parameters as yourself and once the caches updated it reported the values I was expecting.

From memory you're using Community Bubbles? I'd also expect any activity on those forums to update the last updated date. Could that be what's happening here?

Hope the blog post is useful, if you get stuck with any of the user macros drop me a line via the comments on the blog and I'd be happy to help.

Andrew.


author: Mick Davidson
body: That will probably happen overnight, so I'll check in the morning, thanks for the idea.

The thing is we don't have a lot of activity at any time, so I wuoldn't expect the same data for different people. Also, that other macro shows a very different set of date/time data, much more what I'd expect.

More on this later, thanks for your other offer too. :)


author: Mick Davidson
body: Andrew,

I've jut checked the data and it's the same as before. When I check any of the links, the actual edit that s being referenced as 'a minute ago' are weeks and months out of date. This is for both staff and client users

Thanks for all your help on this, but i think I'm going to bump it up to Atlassian.

Cheers


Tags: contributor

macro

summary