The discussion addresses confusion caused by Discourse’s relative time formatting, specifically when durations in weeks or days are prematurely converted to months. binarycat highlights that gaps of approximately 80 days are displayed as “3 months later.” This is particularly problematic on the Rust forums, where threads auto-lock after three months; seeing a “3 months later” banner for an 80-day gap creates ambiguity regarding whether the thread is still active or locked. Additionally, binarycat notes the significant loss of precision when 40 days are rounded up to “2 months.” To mitigate this, they propose that relative times should only switch to month-based display after exceeding 120 days.
supermathie corroborates this frustration, sharing an example where setting a topic to auto-open after 31 days resulted in the interface displaying “1.5 months,” which was then rounded up to “2 months.” supermathie emphasizes the need for exact precision in such scheduling features, stating, “I want 31 days, no more, no less,” rather than ambiguous month-based approximations. The thread underscores a broader UX issue where the current rounding logic sacrifices necessary detail for brevity, leading to user confusion in contexts requiring temporal accuracy, such as forum auto-locking or scheduling.
i noticed this recently and it led to some confusion, a gap of ~80 days between posts will lead to a “3 months later” banner, which is quite confusing on the rust forums, since threads auto-lock after 3 months.
additionally, the loss of precicion in rounding up from 40 days to 2 months is very significant. i propose that these relative times shouldn’t start being displayed in months until they exceed 120 days.
