Cffeed error parsing dates

Question

Hi Everyone,
We use CF 8.0.1 on a windows server with java 1.6.0_16 and just recently we starting seeing issues with feeds parsed with cffeed showing incorrect published dates for the items. The feed has the correct date and I have dumped the feed before the cffeed tag (using cfhttp) and compared it to a dump of the items query. The publish date of the items appears to rotate through 5 possible dates: the correct date, a date a few days before the correct date, a date a couple of weeks before the correct date, a date about a month and a half before the correct date, and a date about a year before the correct date.
The feeds are RSS feeds that displays correctly in other feed readers and it occurs in feeds from several sources.
Has anyone else seen this issue before or have any ideas about what may be occurring? We hadn't had any reports of issues with it before the beginning of this month and we haven't changed our server setups (as far as I have been told anyways).
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Rob

Answer 1

RSS should be using an unambiguous format.
See http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification, which says this:
[quote]
pubDate    The publication date for the content in the channel. For example, the New York Times publishes on a daily basis, the publication date flips once every 24 hours. That's when the pubDate of the channel changes. All date-times in RSS conform to the Date and Time Specification of RFC 822, with the exception that the year may be expressed with two characters or four characters (four preferred).
[/quote]
And RFC-822 details the format:
http://asg.web.cmu.edu/rfc/rfc822.html#
Adam