Imported issues: dates and authors
After importing a BCF file you may find an issue that seems to contradict itself:
Created: 21 July 2026 by
jane@consultant.exampleHistory: created 7 August 2026 at 14:03 by
you@yourfirm.example
Two dates, two people, one issue. Nothing is broken. They are answers to two different questions.
Screenshot to come: an imported issue showing both dates.
The two questions
"When did this issue first exist, anywhere?" That is the date in the BCF file, set by whoever raised it in their own tool three weeks ago. It is the issue's real age, and it is what you want when you are asking how long something has been outstanding.
"When did this appear in our project, and who put it there?" That is the history entry. It is stamped with the moment of the import and names the person who ran it - because that is what actually happened here, and an audit trail that said otherwise would be worse than useless.
Both are true. Neither is a rounding error.
The unfamiliar name
The author on the issue itself usually will not be somebody you added. A BCF file names whoever raised each topic, and the import adds those people to the project as placeholder people so the attribution is not lost.
They have no account, they are never emailed, and they cannot open the project. If the file supplied only an email address and no name, the address is what you will see.
Which one to trust for what
| You want to know | Look at |
|---|---|
| How old the issue really is | The issue's own created date |
| Who originally raised it | The issue's own author |
| When it landed in this project | The history entry |
| Who ran the import | The history entry |
Why it is worth explaining rather than fixing
The obvious "fix" would be to stamp the history entry with the file's date instead. That would make the screen look tidier and make the audit trail lie about when a row was written here.
There are changes planned to make the two easier to tell apart on screen - labelling the history entry as an import rather than a plain creation, and showing the original author next to it. Until those land, this page is the explanation.