Fixing Reflect Archives That Show January 1970 for pub_date

A practical archive-filtering note for Reflect and Ditto setups where publication-date archives accidentally generate an empty 1970 bucket.

If a date archive suddenly shows “January 1970”, the problem is usually not mystical. It usually means one or more records are being treated as timestamp zero somewhere in the archive pipeline.

The donor configuration

[!Reflect?
&getDocuments=`1`
&config=`wordpress`
&id=`news`
&dateFormat=`%d.%m.%Y`
&targetID=`6`
&dateSource=`pub_date`
&dittoSnippetParameters=`dateSource:pub_date`
!]

Why 1970 appears

Unix timestamp zero maps to January 1970. If Reflect or Ditto sees an empty or malformed date as 0, the archive layer can still build a date bucket from it.

What to check

whether all resources have a valid pub_date
whether draft or placeholder resources sneak into the archive query
whether the archive tool falls back to zero when a date field is empty

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