Build-in time bombs

I’ve been refactoring and refactoring some old code, and it’s kind of odd what short-cuts (or even time bombs), you’ll find in code, which apparently wasn’t supposed to live on for years. In a now retired CMS system, we had an issue every new year, when some kind of bug would reset all “schedules” for upcoming stories and content. No-one ever got around to fix it, as the system was soon to be decommissioned - but sadly the bug did survive a few years anyway.

These days, I’m was working in the system, which came to replace the broken system from before. Here’s another odd thing - It was apparently hard coded into the editor in the backend, that stories need to have a “published date” between 1996 and 2011. As there really isn’t any documentation and the original developer has left the company, it’s hard to know why it was made so. While there probably was a reason, it’s lost by now.

 <select name="year" size="1" style="width:55px;" title="Year">
 <?php
   for ($i = 1996; $i < 2011; $i++) {
       printf("<option value=\"%1\$d\"%2\$s>%1\$d</option>",$i,($year == $i) ? " selected" : "");
   }
   ?>
</select>

We fixed it by making the latest “published date” go between 1996 and current year plus one.

While it was an odd thing, I’m surely glad that we from time to time do some sort of maintenance of old code - even while it seems to work perfectly. It’s far from the only bad thing we found, and while most people worry mainly about new code, sometimes you should also remember the old stuff.