SubscriptionFix

A customer wanted to know the dates that subscribe/unsubscribe actions were occurring.

Viewing the newsletter_subscriber table in the magento database, it looks like the date is supposed to be stored, but the field value is always NIL.

Looking around the internets I've found a few others who have run into this and some claim that it used to work in very old version of Magento, but doesn't anymore.

At a guess, I think what happened is that the field definition for change_status_at used to be setup to auto update as a default timestamp (i.e. ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP), but that was lost in some update. So there's no Magento code that writes to the field, because MySql is supposed to magically maintain it.