What Date Format Do You Use?

askvortsov

Hi Flarum community!

I'm working on improving how post dates/time are displayed. Right now, I have the following:

If you're not from the USA (MMM D YYY),
< 30 days ago: Relative
30 days ago < DATE < 1 year: MMM D (if US), D MMM (if not US)
=> 1 year: MMM D, YYYY (if US), D MMM YYYY (if not US)

(as a side note, D means day (4, 15, 31, etc), MMM means month, abbreviated, and YYYY is a 4 digit year.

If you're not from the USA (MMM D YYY), and your country uses a date format other than (D MMM YYYY), please share so I can add that to my pull request!

Littlegolden

askvortsov

the Greater China

(including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Myanmar, South Korea)

< 30 days age: Relative

30 days ago < Date < 1 year: M DD
=> 1 year: YYYY M DD

therealsujitk

askvortsov What about allowing the admin of each forum select whatever date format works best for their community?

rob006

Is there any reason why not use format from moment.js for posts dates?

askvortsov

We actually do use that (for example that provides month translation support). There is a feature that formats the ordering as well, but that depends on moments own locale, which it gets from the flarum server. I don't want to override that, as forum admin should be able to control language on their site.

However, there should be at least some internationalization for date formats, so I'm proposing that we add in some special cases.

tankerkiller125

askvortsov I actually just found in the docs that we could probably use moment().format('LL'); to auto format according to the locale. I'm not sure if moment.js automatically detects the user region or not though.

Edit: Documentation on using locale support https://momentjs.com/docs/#/i18n/

rob006

tankerkiller125 It depends on translations provided by language pack.

askvortsov

@tankerkiller125 That was actually the first thing I tried, but that depends on the server's configured language, which is limited (there's only one en). I want to use the browser's locale settings to determine region (that way we can support english with multiple formats)

rob006

askvortsov It is using forum language (moment translations comes from active language pack). And this is correct approach - you can't use Polish locale for dates, and then use USA date format (it looks strange). If you have Polish forum, it should use Polish date format, even if client browser prefers en-us language.

clarkwinkelmann

I believe most dates in the frontend are already formatted according to the language. Mostly it's using the "ago" time from moment.js. It's correct that we can't customize anything per region right now, unless you split for example en-US and en-UK

There were some existing discussions about specific areas that can't currently be customized easily. I remember discussing the date in the scrubber, which is manually crafted and the month and year order can't be switched by language packs.

If I ruled the world, I would enforce something like YYYY-MM-DD everywhere. MM DD and DD MM is such a madness when you don't know which format you're looking at 🙄

askvortsov

Good point. The issue I was thinking of is that with en, some countries use DMY and others use MDY. I'll add a special case for US and use the localized one otherwise.

As to the enforcement, in any case of data encoding I agree, but the goal here is to display data in a human friendly way.

rob006

askvortsov IMO it still should be responsibility of language pack, and there should not be hardcoded date format in core. If English language pack wants to support rationalized date format by detecting browser language, it should be done in config.js in language pack.

askvortsov

But my point is that en has several different date formats, as opposed to pretty much every other language. I think it would be simplest to add in a special case for US and Canada

jordanjay29

askvortsov I have not, in nearly 5 years of being around Flarum, heard any complaints about Flarum's default of DMY from North American users. I don't think it's especially important to carve out a special case, and if one is necessary, an extension could easily be created with a moment.js to set the locale to en-us.

rob006

askvortsov But my point is that en has several different date formats, as opposed to pretty much every other language.

There are many languages with regionalized variations, you can see them at https://github.com/moment/moment/tree/96d0d6791ab495859d09a868803d31a55c917de1/locale. Having one English language pack may be sufficient for now, but at some point there will be a need to split it into British English and American English (and maybe more), and then date format should be defined in specific language pack. Core is just not a right place to do dates localization.

I suggest just use ll as date format and leave it to language packs.

luceos

rob006 I suggest just use ll as date format and leave it to language packs.

Totally agree with this.

tankerkiller125

rob006 ll or LL they are different in the way they get displayed.

rob006

tankerkiller125 I would use ll. Instead of displaying full month I would rather always display a year (Stack Overflow conditionally displays a year in dates, and I hate it...).

askvortsov

Sounds good, I'll remove the special case. Unfortunately, moment doesn't have localized support for 'MMM D' vs 'D MMM' as we want for 30 days < DATE < 1 year. I'll default that to use 'D MMM' as that seems to be the more common one?

LL would spell out the full month, which IMO could be good, but I didn't want to make that change without a discussion (because as the length of this thread shows, the rest of the issue is completely unanimous agreed upon 😆).

Subarist

askvortsov I'll default that to use 'D MMM' as that seems to be the more common one?

moment().format('MMMM Do YYYY, h:mm:ss a');  // December 9th 2022, 9:37:39 am
moment().format('dddd');                                            // Friday
moment().format("MMM Do YY");                             // Dec 9th 22
moment().format('YYYY [escaped] YYYY');               // 2022 escaped 2022
moment().format();                                                        // 2022-12-09T09:37:39+08:00

Our core doesn't seem to be able to recognize "Do" code.
Like a Chinese site, we can easily change it to "MMM Do "
moment().format("MMM Do "); // 12月 9日
It will be easier to understand. If you choose English, it will be like "Dec 9th", and most of them can be understood.
In order to solve the problem of Chinese date display, we are used to changing "D MMM" to "ll"
But this loses the flexibility of the original design
If w can use "Do", it will be very friendly to non-English languages.

Littlegolden

rob006 but, I found that some countries' moments don't have ll formate...
af en-gb en-SG en-ca en-us

Prosperous

Australia uses DD/MM/YYYY. Simple. At the very least we use DD/MM/YY.

tankerkiller125

Littlegolden This just means that they use the default ll format

rob006

Littlegolden In this case ll is generated based on LL format - for example MMMM is shortened to MMM.