Show detailed timestamp for posts

UX
1

I know you can hover/tap the timestamp to see the exact time, but why not show the full date visibly right away? It doesn’t really add that much text to the page, but I think it would add a lot of value and reduce some confusion.

For example, instead of this:
image

Show this:
image

This is particularly important for differentiating between Jul '18 and Jul 18. I believe that subtle difference is the cause of many revived topics or replies to really old posts, because many people simply miss the '. Specifically, I’d recommend:

  • Keep seconds and minutes the same: 30s, 15m
  • For hours, include the minutes: 5h 20m (currently would say 5h)
  • Anything that was in days, add the time: 2d, 8:36 PM (currently would say 2d or 3d depending on rounding, which can sometimes cause confusion)
  • Anything using a date from this year, add the time: Jul 18 3:57 AM (currently would say Jul 18). The time may be a bit overboard on this one, but I still like it personally.
  • Anything using a date from last year, add the day and show the full year: Jul 25, 2018 (currently would say Jul '18)
4 Likes
2

Discourse believes in simplicity, so people can focus on the words and not be distracted by the metadata around the words. If you want that level of repeated noise on your posts, customize your site to make it so. Nothing is stopping you from doing so.

5 Likes
3

Very well. I understand how that level of detail could be considered noise to some. I think you still might want to seriously consider just changing '18 to 2018 though, because that simplification does cause significant confusion. Otherwise, I understand that the rest of the changes I suggested may make the text more complicated than desired.

2 Likes
4

This is so much desired when Discourse is used in technical contexts (e.g. Openwrt forum) and the posts dates matter a lot to quickly identify outdated content in long running threads! I would want to be able to change this from my user profile and not require each Discourse admin to change anything.

For the time being, I use the following bookmarklet to get full dates whenever I feel there’s ambiguity:

javascript:(function(){Array.prototype.forEach.call(document.getElementsByClassName("relative-date"), function(el) { el.innerText = el.title });})();

+1 for the suggestion about at least using full year, it is especially important for users in regions where year abbreviation is not a thing (France in my case).

4 Likes