Hi all, I happened to notice the default date format of our forums which can be very ambiguous on certain dates.
You see, some countries write month-day-year, other cultures write day-month-year.
See them on a map!
Consider a day like December, 11th - how would you tell if this is actually meant or rather November, 12th?
I would vote to switch the forum default to a more unambiguous way. For example, in my last example here, there can be no wiggle room.
I don't think we need the name of the day at all, at all.
This would leave us with three unambiguous choices. Below is the full list for your reference.
edit: Please note, this is only deciding the default value. Every user may switch to her personal favorite anyway.
[Image: 0BCzLBE.png]
I agree it would probably be better to avoid any ambiguity, but I don't really have a clear preference as I'm not sure what a native English speaker might find most natural.
i would much prefer MDY as that is most natural to me. However i can understand the confusion as when i go to other sites, sometimes its DMY and i get confused on which it is. So i guess if we had to change it from its current MDY format, i personally prefer December 11, 2016...but its so damn long. And i agree that the day name is not important as well.
Quote:2016-12-11
my problem with this option is you could in theory say the same thing....would it be dec 11th, or nov 12th?
On the other hand though, i dont think its too big of a deal to change at all as each user can define it how they like if they dont like the default.
"11th December, 2016" is close to what I prefer, "11 December 2016" which I think is relatively common.
"December, 11th 2016" would get my vote, if only the comma was in the right place.
im pretty sure we could remove the comma, or move it, etc.
(Dec-13-2016, 04:15 PM)metulburr Wrote: [ -> ]i personally prefer December 11, 2016...but its so damn long.
This only pertains to older posts though. Most recent posts show dates like "2 minutes ago", "3 hours ago", etc.
(Dec-13-2016, 04:15 PM)metulburr Wrote: [ -> ]Quote:2016-12-11
my problem with this option is you could in theory say the same thing....would it be dec 11th, or nov 12th?
The first choice, as it is always YMD and never YDM. Literally nobody uses YDM. Check the wikipedia link above for more information on different ways to write dates.
YMD starts with the largest time frame (Y) and ends at the smallest (D). This is handy: When you want to sort alphabetically, it automatically sorts chronologically too.
(Dec-13-2016, 04:15 PM)metulburr Wrote: [ -> ]Quote:2016-12-11
my problem with this option is you could in theory say the same thing....would it be dec 11th, or nov 12th?
This is the ISO-8601 date format, I don't think that will be a major problem.
Believe it or not, somewhere in my library I have a complete book on date formatting
Im sure we could also alter the dates such as
Dec 11 2016
to shorten it up
Edit:
changed for display
ACP -> Configuration -> Date and time formats -> Date Format (changed
m ->
M)
http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php