Some maintainers metadata does not seem accurate

[jasminewang0]

In exploring some packages, the "created_at" data field for maintainers seems inaccurate. For example, hitting the API for pkg:npm/sntp has inaccurate timestamps for user nlf in the response body:

        "uuid": "nlf",
        "login": "nlf",
        "name": null,
        "email": ...,
        "url": null,
        "packages_count": 315,
        "html_url": "https://www.npmjs.com/~nlf",
        "role": null,
        "created_at": "2022-11-20T02:07:53.894Z",
        "updated_at": "2022-11-20T02:07:53.894Z",
        "packages_url": "https://packages.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/registries/npmjs.org/maintainers/nlf/packages"

This user has been on the platform for much longer than 2022, having published packages since at least 12 years ago.

I also noticed that the other 3 maintainers in this package have the "created_at" field as 2023-12-13T21:49:58, with a difference of milliseconds, which is also inaccurate since 2 of the maintainers (1, 2) at a quick glance have been publishing packages for a decade now.

Is the created_at timestamp actually intended to be the first time the API has seen and recorded the user?

[andrew]

Is the created_at timestamp actually intended to be the first time the API has seen and recorded the user?

Yeah this is the case, the majority package manager registries do not provide the date the user was created in their APIs, so it's when the record was first created in our database.