Issue: Comments all have todays date

This is because of templates in your custom style which have been modified in a non-canonical way. If you view the comments using the Default Style, the dates are correct.

Your custom style places the date information directly inside the generic "message" template, which is supposed to be agnostic of content-type, and hard-codes post content-type permalinks. Post-specific content is not relevant to wiki comments.

"Post" specific information is supposed to be isolated in the wrapper template "post", which then includes the generic "message" template internally. In this way, VaultWiki's "vw_commentbit_vertical" template is a wrapper which includes the "message" template. Wiki-comment specific information is isolated in this vw_ template, as it should be.

In order to correct the dates on VaultWiki comments, you will need to rethink the way you have edited the "message", "post", and "vw_commentbit_vertical" templates in your custom style. The current design of your templates is simply incorrect.

This is Not a Bug in VaultWiki.

Could you please look into how I can have it styles so that it fits my style? You say the style is incorrect and the styling company said that VW at the time of creating it lacked styling settings they need. So I am left stuck in the middle with this issue. Any help with this would be welcome.

This has nothing to do with styling settings. Your custom "message" template hardcodes items which are not intended for that scope by default.

The way it's supposed to be is as in the default style, where the date and the post-permalink are both defined in the "post" template. The "post" template then calls the "message" template which uses the date and permalink that were already set. Any other data which is only relevant to the post content-type is handled by the "post" template, and sets generic variables. The generic variables are what the "message" template uses; it should not directly handle data that is for one content-type or another. This is the way it was designed by XenForo, and is how VaultWiki expects it to be setup in any style.

In your custom style, you have removed the date and permalink from the "post" template, and instead have hardcoded it inside the "message" template. To resolve the issue, move the custom code back out to the "post" template, set a custom variable that contains it, and place the custom variable in the customized "message" template. You will also have to implement setting your custom variable in the "vw_commentbit_vertical" template for that style.

IIRC this relates to horizontal postbit layout. In vbulletin there is an easy option to use an horizontal postbit so that the user data is at the top of the post. In XenForo this works differently. As many sites like to have a horizontal postbit, XenBase has a simple setting for it. XenBase is the most used styling platform for XF. As neither of the above options worked for VW, the designer had to use a workaround and hardcoded the aforementioned elements.

Does VW currently have a horizontal postbit layout option? I do not see a vw_commentbit_horizontal template.

https://xenforo.com/community/thread...layout.141431/
https://xenforo.com/community/thread...postbit.53578/

Under XenForo, the vw_commentbit_vertical template is simply a wrapper for XenForo's message template. XenForo's message template provides all layout. If your message template has been modified to support horizontal layout, then it would automatically be applied to wiki comments as well. There is no need for a separate vw_commentbit_horizontal template, because under this principle, it would just be a clone of vw_commentbit_vertical (invoking message with some variable names set).

But your message template contains specific references to 'thread' and 'post' elements, which is improper, because as you already noticed (from what I see in the message-template code) this causes problems in other content types, such as conversations and tickets (and of course VaultWiki comments). As described in my post above, these 'post'/'thread' references should be isolated within the "post" template (which wraps the message template too), or other such template depending on the content-type, and passed in as a generic variable. It may well be a bug in the underlying XenBase style as you suggest, or it may be a customization you made to the style. Either way it is not a bug that VaultWiki has the power to fix. The bug is not present in our code, nor possible to workaround in our code without writing a completely unique message template for VaultWiki (an approach that the XenForo devs did not intend add-on authors to take).