Are brackets required for some technical reason or is that just a preference? I think just using War In Ukraine - 28 April 2022 looks better than the bulky curvy brackets.
The only reason I can see to use the year first option is if the threads were sorted by the date in the title, which they won’t be.
Either way, I’m good with it and will flag anything I think should have a date. Thanks, mods.
I have a habit of adding my title edits in some sort of brackets. That is just some weird Anal-Retentiveness or minor OCD thing on my part and nothing required.
CCYYMMDD is just the right way to do dates, but I’m a retired Programmer. So take that with a grain of salt.
I agree that ccyymmdd is the right way to do dates. I also favor the shortest reasonable addition, as long thread names get truncated and are a nuisance. Which is another reason i prefer a bare 2022-04-29.
I note that some breaking news threads aren’t really date-specific. We’ve had a thread for breaking news on covid for a while, for instance, and fixing it to a day would just be weird. I think we had broken it into years at least once…i wonder if we failed to do that for 2022. If so, i may go do that.
So, war in Ukraine breaking news should maybe get just a year? Not a specific date.
My intention was to use both, for different reasons. The date so people understand what the topic is. The tag so people understand what the thread rules are.
Tags can be about 20 characters long. Is breaking-news the best tag name or would something else work better?
Breaking-news seems fine.
I hadn’t thought of it in the terms of edits, that makes sense.
Count me in with the dashes. Maybe this in my OCD thing, I just think it looks neater.
I’d just leave it for now, there is a lot of 2022 left and I don’t think we are going to see a resolution before years end. I like the idea of locking a thread at the end of a calendar year and starting a new one with updated year. Kind of like how you guys do the threads that reach 10,000 posts.
Yeah, I like the breaking news idea.
I’m confused, and I didn’t see this mentioned. In the skin/theme I’m using (Sam’s Simple Theme), within the forum where I see the lists of individual threads, there is a line under the thread title with the ID of the person who started the thread, and the date when the thread was started. Do the other themes not have this?
I do not see that on my phone. If i look at a forum, i just see the thread title, The number of posts, and when it was last posted to. Oh, and the avatar of the most recent poster.
If i look at the list of unread threads, it also shows me any tags. (Maybe it would within a forum, if i had stuff in that forum that was tagged.)
I don’t use a phone for this board, I only use my desktop computer. So adding the dates as a convenience for mobile users may just be repeat information for desktop dinosaurs like me.
On my desktop using Classic Theme, I get Title>Original Poster>People with most posts>Date/Time of last post. So no start date at all. Once I have the thread open, I see the start date listed at the bottom of the first post.
My phone is similar to puzzlegal , which is one of the many reasons I never use it.
Nice job, WhatExit.
Now, with all those curvy brackets, the main page has a certain rococo visual style.
For all that running this place can be like herding cats, Dopers do seem to be pretty good about adopting useful conventions in their posts. This is a good idea, and I expect that it’ll mostly catch on on its own, with very little moderator intervention required.
For what it’s worth, I usually write dates as 30 Apr 2022. That way, it’s completely unambiguous, no matter the reader’s usual convention, which part is the month and which part is the day, and the letters serve as a divider between the two numbers. But I don’t think we need to set an official date format for the SDMB; I imagine that when people post their own dates, they’ll do it in their own format (there’s where the cat-herding comes in).
But we can still call them names and stuff until they are assimilated and post the date in the correct format, right? After all, it is written that there can be only one.
I totally agree. Especially as i do think some need should have just a year, and other news should have a date.
I use the Straight Dope Light theme on a desktop and it doesn’t show a start date. However, if you hover over the time since the last posting in the Activity column, the start date will be revealed. If I ever knew that, I’ve long forgotten it.