What might cause two dates to appear on a blog post?

Some WordPress templates show the published and updated dates side by side. For example, https://bootscore.me/ does this and separates the two with a forward slash.

If you want to fix this then in the child theme you override the date function. So with bootScore in particular you would take this function:

function bootscore_date()
{
  $time_string = '<time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="%1$s">%2$s</time>';
  if (get_the_time('U') !== get_the_modified_time('U')) {
    $time_string = '<time class="entry-date published" datetime="%1$s">%2$s</time> <span class="time-updated-separator">/</span> <time class="updated" datetime="%3$s">%4$s</time>';
  }

  $time_string = sprintf(
    $time_string,
    esc_attr(get_the_date(DATE_W3C)),
    esc_html(get_the_date()),
    esc_attr(get_the_modified_date(DATE_W3C)),
    esc_html(get_the_modified_date())
  );

  $posted_on = sprintf(
  /* translators: %s: post date. */
    '%s',
    '<span rel="bookmark">' . $time_string . '</span>'
  );

  echo '<span class="posted-on">' . $posted_on . '</span>'; // WPCS: XSS OK.
}

and redefine it in your functions.php file as this:

function bootscore_date()
{
  $time_string = '<time class="entry-date published" datetime="%1$s">%2$s</time>';

  $time_string = sprintf(
    $time_string,
    esc_attr(get_the_date(DATE_W3C)),
    esc_html(get_the_date()),
    esc_attr(get_the_modified_date(DATE_W3C)),
    esc_html(get_the_modified_date())
  );

  $posted_on = sprintf(
    /* translators: %s: post date. */
    '%s',
    '<span rel="bookmark">' . $time_string . '</span>'
  );

  echo '<span class="posted-on">' . $posted_on . '</span>'; // WPCS: XSS OK.

}

which will remove the updated date and only keep the published date.

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