The way that the dates are written to show when a post was made can cause confusion. Sometimes an old thread started years ago, lets say on October 3, 2018, gets bumped. Then the posting date shows as “Oct '18.”
But then the new posts show as, for example, “Oct 18.”
It would be much clearer if the previous-year posts were written as “Oct 2018.”
People have been complaining about this for several months.
No response on it, though.
Thanks! I looked a little to see if it was already covered, but obviously I didn’t look hard enough. (Actually I did not want to start a whole new thread for this relatively small thing, but I didn’t see a good alternative.)
It’s a rather strange oversight. So much of Discourse’s user interface shows impeccable attention to detail. This is a surprising exception.
Consider yourself lucky that it’s not grayed-out by design, like the hot “edit this post” button.
This seems to have nothing to do with Discourse itself, but with the themes.
The themes have been edited a few times before, and it would be helpful to change this too.
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one confused about the dates…
I don’t understand the reluctance to just use the entire date. I have quite a bit of experience reading dates, and I manage to read dates that include the day just as fast as dates with only the month and year. What possible benefit is there to leaving that out?
I think this is one reason a lot of zombies are getting bumped. People see “October-06” and think it means the thread was only two weeks old when in fact it was from the year 2006.
I definitely would prefer to see complete dates for all posts, new and old. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Yup. Times, too, if they can manage it.
I agree. Unnecessary abbreviation is unnecessary
You’re right and, in fact, it is only one more character in length but much clearer in meaning.
I totally agree. The more complete the time of the post, the better.
Paging @codinghorror for insight
I’m sure he’ll be by to tell us why we don’t need that, how we’d all better off learning how to read more carefully.
There is a reason I was not posting in this topic 
Is there a reason we can’t have the full date show? Besides “that’s not the way we want you to do it”? Is it an easy fix?
Don’t be coy. Please share with us what that reason is.
Bumping this. It’s still an ongoing issue. It can and does cause confusion. Another poster just thought a thread started in February 2015 was actually started on February 15, 2021.
It’s an odd choice, since people don’t generally tend to refer to years past 2000 in this manner. I’ve never seen the construction “February '15” outside of Discourse. The only situation where I see two digit post-2000 years is when using entirely numerical dates, e.g. 2/14/15. It just seems odd to not just write “February 2015,” the standard way of writing that.
If it’s a setting that an admin can change, that would be nice to know, as we can hopefully have them fix this when we get an active admin. Users have no way of knowing whether something is something an admin can address.
Yeah, that little ’ is very easy to miss. Having at least all 4 digits for the year would be useful. In fact, I’d really like to see the full date for posts that happened in a different year than the current one.