Confusing date format
 

Is there anything that can be done to fix the confusing date format on FlyerTalk? 11-10-2003 looks like 11th October 2003 to most people, whereas to users in the United States it looks like 10th November 2003.

It seems that the software is designed specifically for users in the United States. Most countries use DMY for dates, whereas Japan uses YMD and the United States uses MDY.

Can't we have dates in an internationally friendly format, e.g. dd-mmm-yyyy or 10-Nov-2003 for 10th November 2003? Otherwise it would be nice if the user's chosen date format could be set in the preferences.

mm/dd/yyyy is fine with me!
George W. may talk Tony B. in changing this in the UK too. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif
Actually, driving on the "wrong" side is a little more confusing to me...

We changed it to an extended format (November 11, 2003), which should alleviate the confusion.

Thank you for the change. Much appreciated. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

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You can't miss something you haven't had.

Remember that 61 countries (one third of the world's population) drive on the left, whereas only one country writes its dates as month-day-year. :-)

nfh:
Thanks for posting this, very interesting!
And you got your "extended date format" too!

A dissent.

I hate the extra space it takes up. It stretches column width for date (making other columns narrower) and/or increases the height of the table rows, reducing readability.

If enough others are bothered in the same way, a possible compromise would be a DD-MMM-YY format.

Ditto, fwiw.

Unfortunately, that isn't a format offered by UBB (shortened month names).

Me too, for the same reasons.

I don't think confusion is a real issue in this case because dates in all popular forums start with either today or yesterday. That makes it easy for folks who are used to
"world standard" date order to know what's meant without undue delay (while giving them, if they so choose, yet another opportunity to swear at those foolish Yanks).

If it was a real problem, one (or many) of the active FTs from outside the U.S. would have mentioned it long ago.

For the sake of a more friendly screen layout, can we please go back?

If I can tweak UBB's code to display the shortened months (3-letter), would you still want to go back?

[This message has been edited by dan at WebFlyer (edited Nov 12, 2003).]

I see you've achieved this. Thanks and well done! If possible, I think that dd-mmm-yyyy would be more logical than mmm dd, yyyy. If anyone still doesn't like the new date format, many international web sites use Japanese format, i.e. yyyy-mm-dd, which is surprising easy for almost any nationality to understand. Just an idea.

Also, is there anything that can be done about the time? It seems to be Californian time, which certainly doesn't suit all Americans, let alone the rest of the world. The global standard is usually to use UTC (also known as GMT) which doesn't even suit the British for six months of the year. Also am/pm may be fine for us Brits and Americans but not so easy for the rest of the world. 24-hour time is more universally understood.

Thanks for the adjustment.

(Regarding the time, it's N. American Mountain time, which I assume is the local time of the FlyerTalk offices. Seems to me a reasonable tribute to FT. And, since virtually no one on earth lives in that time zone, pretty much everyone is in similar shape.)

Another thank you for the new date format, which is a huge improvement although I would also prefer day before month.

And another plea for the 24 hour clock, please. It is really irritating to have to remember, constantly, that 01:05 PM comes after 12:55 PM.

Thanks so much for marginalizing those of us who live in Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Colorado Springs, Boise ... http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/tongue.gif