"posted 'x' days ago"

AMEN!

—Gerry

-- Gerry -- "I don't plan to ever really grow up ... I'm just going to learn how to act in public!"

A day counter is simpler than even a look-up table for day of the month. Really. What happens when the post ages a year? That gets complicated. Back in the day of early PCs, memory was so small they only provided for two digits in the year part of the date. You know where that went.

-- Random Orbital Nailer

I prefer the day counter. Even without doing the math, a topic started 58 days ago is just plain tired, and know I probably shouldn’t post because it’s long forgotten. A post on may 16th on the other hand, I’m sitting here, thinking, “ok that’s either two weeks old and good, or it’s about a month old and not worth it….How many days are in may again? What’s today’s date?”

atomjack- yes i remember the days when microsoft made everyone think the world was going to come to an end when the new century arrived. computers were going to revert to 1900 and then disappear cause they didn’t exist yet. the company i was working for at the time spent gobs of money on upgrades that fall. what a farce that was, eh? was nothing more than a hype to sell millions of dollars of upgraded operating systems. Y2K! at the time i was running windows 95 and didn’t upgrade anything and you know what… it was still working on new years day 2000. no surprise there. lol. of course i was forced to upgrade cause no new software would work with it cause it wasn’t Y2K. so they eventually got me…. they always win.

-- >> my shop teacher used to say "do the best at everything you make for your mom because you're going to see it for the rest of your life!" <<

rogerw—Y2K wasn’t all Microsoft’s deal … a bunch of Unix systems did die. I know … my company made some serious scratch replacing old SCO Unix systems from one of our competitors with our new Windows 2000-based systems.

AtomJack—They must be storing the date a post was created in their database. If the dates were stored as Unix time or POSIX time, then conversion to a ‘friendly’ readable format only takes one line of code. I’d have to crack the books to prove it, but it seems to me ‘days ago’ would actually be a more complicated calculation.

—Gerry

-- Gerry -- "I don't plan to ever really grow up ... I'm just going to learn how to act in public!"

TheDane, Not really. A few lines of code at most. In my VB class in HS, I had created a program in less than half an hour that calculated the number of days from one date to another. It took into account leap years and moths having different numbers of days in it. It was an intro class, so I wasn’t that experienced, and it wasn’t a book exercise, so it was my own code.

All you need really is something like that and two dates: the one stored by the post, and the one current to the server (using the client side date would be a headache for many reasons). Run it through the program, throw it up on the web with a bit of PHP, and you’re good. (I’m sure though the logistics of it must require more advanced coding to handle so many dates at the same time without killing a machine, but the ideas similar)

A lot of sites use the “days ago” format. It’s just becoming the new norm.

I think God did the 24 hr day and the 365 1/4 day year just so we’d have to learn math.

-- "The way to make a small fortune in woodworking- start with a large one"

remember to throw in the time zone factor, with people in today, tomorrow, and yesterday all at the same time.

-- ~ Debbie, Canada (https://www.facebook.com/DebbiePribeleENJOConsultant)

MsDebbieP—Our programmers dealt with that issue by storing everything in Unixtime GMT. Our client software uses the local computer’s time zone property to get the GMT offset for local time.

—Gerry

-- Gerry -- "I don't plan to ever really grow up ... I'm just going to learn how to act in public!"

I stopped paying attention to days, date, or whatever means are used to identify the age of a post. If it is of interest to me and I feel I have something of value to add, I do it. The worst I could do is to beat a dead horse of a post. The best I could do would be to revive an old topic that may need more discussion on after some of us have had time to either learn somthing new or to think on the matter longer. Fresh eyes (or minds) on a topic may sometimes bring entirely new results. Also, with so many members, and so many posts, there’s no way everyone here has seen every post. So reviving an old one may bring it to the attention of someone who didn’t see it the first go around.
I commented a while back on a post that was posted over a thousand days ago. I didn’t realize it was that old until someone brought it to my attention.

-- http://wddsrfinewoodworks.blogspot.com/

I prefer how it is now. On other sites I often find myself having to do math to find out how old a post is. Just my 2 shillings worth.

-- Backer boards, stop blocks, build oversized, and never buy a hand plane--

I like the way it is, now, too.

My $0.02. YMMV.

-- -- Neil

I like it the way it is too. If its 58 days old, I know its 58 days old.

-- http://timetestedtools.net - Collecting is an investment in the past, and the future.

i ‘watch’ things that interest me
if the main question has been answered 30 times
i may ‘unwatch it’

but most posts disappear after 1 1/2 to 2 days

so i just leave ‘watch’ alone now

some new guy may be cruising and find it of interest
and it comes back to me then
as a new notice

some stuff i have to read the posts and the comments
again it does help refresh old ideas
i may have forgotten

i can’t keep track of the date as it is
so 174 days ago means more to me than some date

i only have 10 fingers
and there are 12 months

-- david - only thru kindness can this world be whole . If we don't succeed we run the risk of failure. Dan Quayle

Whatever system is used, the age may still be missed by a new poster – there was a one today for a query that was originally entered 1313 days ago!

-- Don, Somerset UK, http://www.donjohnson24.co.uk