A discussion on changing the date format in Discourse to make it clearer, specifically for older posts. The current format MMM 'YY can be ambiguous. Some users prefer DD Mmm and Mmm YYYY to avoid confusion.
@erlend_sh suggests showing the full year, and @codinghorror questions the need for the century in the year. Others propose using international date formats like YYYY-MM-DD or DD MM YYYY.
@sam mentions plans to add support for customizing date formats via the UI. In the meantime, users have found workarounds, such as using CSS to display the full year or editing the text content to change the date format.
@tophee provides a detailed guide on how to change the date format, including searching for MMM and editing the relevant text content elements.
The discussion concludes with @sam suggesting that the issue will become less of a problem in the future, but @riking disagrees, stating that it will still be a problem even after 2032.
<ii> riking_: it doesnt say if its feb 2013 or 13th of feb etc
<ii> the '13 would suggest 2013 tho
(after getting it wrong)
<culex> I thought Feb didn'th ave the apostrophe
<Malqua> no
<Malqua> it was definitely jan ??, 13
I think that the date formats, even for English, should be changed to DD Mmm (so 13 Jan) and Mmm 'YY (the current, so Feb '13). This way, they are visually different.
You are cherry picking a bit with the example, it is not common to see those two forms next to each other.
I don’t mind the day-first form, e.g. 13 Feb and Feb 13 are about the same to me. So if choosing one over the other makes the display clearer in this somewhat rare case that’s fine.
It’s a prefix of 20 to express year as opposed to '. It’s a 1 character difference, and it leaves no room for confusion. It doesn’t have to be default, but I’d certainly want a setting for it to appease my European sensibilities.
Nah, I just tried it out by editing the fields (couldn’t get a screenshot, they reverted before I was done).
It’s too repetitive. And it’s really adding 2 full letter-glyphs per date, not 1 - the ' isn’t much of a glyph visually, and that’s why I was asking for this change.
For Chinese, we are only accustomed to Mmm DD format. Eh, exactly, it should always be M月D日.
Or YYYY-MM-DD format, I assume this is because Discuz is popular among PRC.
If only there were some type of international standard for date formats “to avoid misinterpretation of numeric representations of dates and times, particularly when data are transferred between countries with different conventions for writing numeric dates and times” …
I think @erlend_sh’s response to this concern is pretty spot-on:
Plus, more often than not you’re reading new stuff from the latest page. So first, you don’t get barraged with the extra character all the time anyway. And second, since you get well trained to see things as MM DD.
So seeing MM YYYY when you get to an old post is a good call-out that these post are different than what you’re used to seeing.
