Why is the date of a draft used instead of the publication date when publishing an article.?

I was quite surprised by your question, as usually this should not be happening - the publish date is leading of course and it should not be relevant when a draft originally has been created.

So I just published a (test) draft we created more than a month ago in a hidden space on our community here, the publish date was not the date the draft was created.

Then I thought maybe it just happens if you don’t save changes before publishing it - but also in this case I could not reproduce your observation.

Did you experience this for all recent drafts which you have published? I will flag this to the support team in case you have not done that already, because this sounds like it needs investigation / fixing by a developer.

When publishing a draft, you publish it in a certain section. Inside of this section, it is indeed published with the date of publishing and not the date of creating the draft.

However, when looking at the front page, where it shows an overview of all recently active threads across all sections, it will not show at the top because here it does use the date of creating the draft. Please see the following two screenshots which were taken at the same time. The first screenshot is from the section where the draft was published. The second screenshot is from the front page, after scrolling dozens of posts before finding it.

Thanks for the details, this really helps finding the issue. It seems this problem only appears on the homepage feed for recently active topics, in categories it seems to work just fine.

I am certain that this is a bug, I have reported it now and hope it will be fixed very quickly!

We have a ticket into Support where we’re experiencing this (and have been for weeks) in the Product Updates module. 

The posts themselves are showing the correct date, but (seemingly) everywhere else it’s ordered by draft date: Product Updates feed, activity feeds, etc. 

Sorry to hear that. After reporting it to support myself, I have also received the response that the team is aware of this and that we have tickets marked as important to have this fixed. So I hope that you will notice soon that this has been resolved and that the activity stream shows the content in the expected order (with correct publish date of course).