Difficulty dating posts

[gtmaskall]

Hi folks,

I have a suggestion to propose as food for thought (up for discussion). I’ve found the cognitive load to be quite high when trying to understand how old is a post. This goes both for listings of posts as well as the timeline within a post (examples below).

Note that older posts with the year (e.g. Dec '21) are very similar to posts in the current year with the date (e.g. Jan 14) and differ only by the apostrophe. In a post view, the “post n of N” in the format “n/N” is useful, but wasn’t obvious to me initially, and given its proximity to the post date adds to the cognitive load of understanding the timeline - “Is the top of the timeline Mar 2017 and this post is now second of April? Or is it 4 February because they’re American?.. Oh, wait, no, it’s post 2 of 4” kinda thing.

Arguably this will easier the more one uses this site and gets used to it, but if the site gives admins easy scope to tweak the format of these dates for clarity and to reduce ambiguity, I’d welcome that.

[dave]

Thanks for the feedback, you’re not alone! Show post Year? - feature - Discourse Meta

I believe I changed all the two-digit years to four-digit years, hopefully that helps.

[gtmaskall]

Thanks for looking into that @dave , and far more promptly than my acknowledgement now! So this seems to replace the 'yy format with yyyy, and, as such, the two digits are much easier to spot that a single apostrophe. Thanks.