Seeing one year old posts with today's date

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1

The idiosyncratic way in which dates are displayed in posts has been discussed before, I believe, but today, I noticed that (probably due to time zone issues) there are posts displaying today’s (Feb 14) date (for me), which have been created a year ago:

It caught me somewhat off-guard seeing a post from today followed by one from tomorrow…

If it matters, I’m using the current version of Chrome with the ‘Straight Dope Light’-theme. My timezone is (correctly) set to Europe/Berlin.

(And no, this topic is not at all similar to How are today’s 13-year-old kids different from 13-year-olds in 1978?…)

2

Are you a time traveler? In my experience that’s almost always the answer to questions like this.

Was it just one post that you noticed this, but others were okay? Can you link us to the actual post? It’s probably too late for us to experience what you did, but it couldn’t hurt to have someone that knows about this stuff (which is not me) to look at it.

3

Since this is about Discourse’s software, let’s move this to Site Feedback (from ATMB).

4

There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

(Old computer joke - I didn’t make this up)

5

Thanks for moving, @engineer_comp_geek.

Here’s the first post with the issue, but all others on that day show the same behavior (in that thread, I haven’t gone looking for other posts from exactly a year ago).

6

Could it be that those posts are less than one year old (by a few hours…) and thus show the date without the year? As one when I type this, the oldest post from Feb 14th 2021 in that thread is 3 hours away from a year.

7

I think that’s it; right now, this post is showing 'Feb ‘21’, having crossed the year-mark half an hour ago, while the following one, which is an hour younger, shows as ‘Feb 14’:

So the solution should be to just use whole days for the switchover between the date formats. (Or use a different, less confusing date format…)

8

I vote for a different, less confusing, date format. I run into problems every time an old thread is bumped because i misread the dates.

9

Seconded.

It’s not a major issue for me; but it is annoying. (And I’m pretty sure it’s come up before.)

10

Thirded. Having nothing but a tiny little apostrophe to distinguish between something posted yesterday (13 February 2022) and something posted in February 2013 is ridiculous.

11

Those posts were mine. I made them Feb, 2021.

My later posts were Feb. 2022.

If that helps at all.

It says above my this year’s post: “12 months later”

12

I just noticed something that merits resurrecting this thread: Discourse is now displaying the post date of posts older than a year old using the full 4-digit year, not the “apostrophe-two-digit-year” thing everyone was complaining about.

When did that change?

13

Yay!.

14

Yay!2

(I reckoned the resolution of an issue that has bugged so many people for so long would have gotten more than one congratulatory post)

15

Yay!3
Indeed.

16

Yay!4

I think the original problem (displaying yesterday’s post as Feb 16 and displaying a post from five years ago as Feb '11) arose from the idealistic programmer concept that only the minimum information necessary to resolve ambiguity needs to be displayed. Attention, programmers: this site is used by human beings, not machines! Surprised it took this long for them to figure this out.

17

Yip, yip, yippie!

18

It’s about time!

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ISWYDT