Dates: a modest proposal

[Steve F]

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.

[joroas]

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................ 

[Red Orc]

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.

[6milPhil]

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.

[Dr. The Viking]

I've been using '5th of June' style for ages. A board wide appeal is a nice thought, but hardly everybody reads this.