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General => Announcements and forum stuff => About Forum => Topic started by: Steve F on 09 September 2012, 10:31:01 AM

Title: Dates: a modest proposal
Post by: Steve F on 09 September 2012, 10:31:01 AM
Today the ninth day of September, we can all agree, is 9/9.  But tomorrow, some people will be making posts and dating them 10/9, while others will be dating them 9/10, and I'll start getting confused again.  And were posts labelled 9/8 made yesterday by an American, or are they older topics started by a European on 9 August?

I don't want to debate the merits of different orderings of day and month - we've all got the systems we use in our different countries too deeply engrained for that - but it occurs to me that we could short-circuit misunderstanding by putting the month in letters, not numbers.  Since space in topic titles is short, we could use the three letter abbreviations.

Then it wouldn't matter if someone wrote 10 Sep or Sep 10 - there'd be no scope for confusion.

Alternatively, we could go old-fashioned and use Roman numerals for months - 10/ix or ix/10 for tomorrow - but I suspect that that has fallen irretrievably out of use.
Title: Re: Dates: a modest proposal
Post by: joroas on 09 September 2012, 10:41:03 AM
Quote
Alternatively, we could go old-fashioned and use Roman numerals for months - 10/ix or ix/10 for tomorrow - but I suspect that that has fallen irretrievably out of use.

and years as MMXII, etc. for the professional Romanophile................  lol
Title: Re: Dates: a modest proposal
Post by: Red Orc on 09 September 2012, 01:26:23 PM
I've started abreviating for the month on posts (such as my current eaby auction 'updated Sept 2nd') for those very reasons - wanting to get away from the whole 02/09-09/02 confusion, but not having space to write out 'September' in full. Even though in that case I'm not posting to the US so no-one who uses their dating system is likely to be bidding anyway.

3-letter abreviations would be even better of course.
Title: Re: Dates: a modest proposal
Post by: 6milPhil on 09 September 2012, 02:00:28 PM
It's a euro forum so a euro format should be adopted by those outside of it, but yes using month names makes much more sense and is more agreeable to the eye.
Title: Re: Dates: a modest proposal
Post by: Dr. The Viking on 14 September 2012, 04:48:20 PM
I've been using '5th of June' style for ages. A board wide appeal is a nice thought, but hardly everybody reads this.