Why game's dates ALWAYS change to the current after downloading chapters/studies?

@AAArmstark said in #10:

The problem with ChessBase seems to be that on import it overwrites the "Date" tag with the "UTCDate" tag (which is added on Lichess when the study chapter is created) because it comes later in the PGN.

But the "Date" tag is preserved in the end (what is twice mentioned above is this discussion).
"EventDate" tag is removed.
And "UTCDate", "UTCTime" tags are added.

Yes, when you create the study chapter on Lichess, the "UTCDate" and "UTCTime" tags are added (and the "EventDate" tag is removed, but that's another issue I'd say)

If you now import this PGN into ChessBase it will see both the "Date" and "UTCDate" tags in the file and apparently ChessBase will use whichever of the two comes later in the PGN for its "Date".

You can grab a really handy pgn-extract: https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/djb/pgn-extract/
Open command-prompt where your PGN is and run:

pgn-extract -s --detag UTCDate -o newfilename.pgn study-you-have-downloaded.pgn

to remove UTCDate tags from PGN.

I would argue that adding UTCDate to a study is a bug. It makes sense for played server games, or when imported. But wIth manually added games, it adds conflicting data that is just plain wrong. Those tags are reserved for playing dates I think.

What makes it worse, is that usually you never see those tags, as they are not shown in study itself.

In my usecase, I now need to recheck every single date of a game I imported into ChessBase. I often enter my OTB games as a stidy first, but sometimes not the same day.

I probably should file a github bug for this.

@nadjarostowa said in #14:

But wIth manually added games, it adds conflicting data that is just plain wrong.

I can't agree more!

And still don't know what to do with this, especially I don't want people who download my public Study/Studies to get all games with a wrong/nonsense Date.