Yes, that is not cool. By coincidence, a few days ago, I followed a link to an SO blog article, but the link was broken, I searched the article title on Google, which led me... to the same 404 page again. So I took to the great Internet Archive which fortunately worked. Only later have I found that because the article in question was so good they chose to republish it, all original links broke in the process.

thats cause the date is part of the URL. so changing the date changed the URL, and so thereby violated nr 2 of the Cool URL rules:

URL-Rule 1: unique (1 URL == 1 resource, 1 resource == 1 URL)

URL-Rule 2: permanent (they do not change, no dependencies to anything)

URL-Rule 3: manageable (equals measurable, 1 logic per site section, no complicated exceptions, no exceptions)

URL-Rule 4: easily scalable logic

URL-Rule 5: short

URL-Rule 6: with a variation (partial) of the targeted phrase

URL-Rule 1 is more important than 1 to 6 combined, URL-Rule 2 is more important than 2 to 6 combines, … URL-Rule 5 and 6 are a trade-of. 6 is the least important.

To game search engine dupe detection maybe?

To get the same benefit of posting article without writing new one.

And it worked, it reached front page again. I wonder how often then recycle articles and post them with fake dates.