It will be nice to have a relative time together with the old version of time. I know that there is mod already made by Live is not that popular but it is a nice add up though. IMO it will make the forum look more modern especially if the time can be made more live. This can be referred to SimpleNetwork Mod by Marcus.
The problem with relative time is that it sort of falls apart if it's not updated in real(ish) time. To have a post open from 'a few seconds ago' in a tab that's a day old in the browser can look a bit silly.
Well you could make the same argument about the today and yesterday, but in practice it never seems to cause any complaints. I think most people would be ok with old tabs showing old content.
Today/Yesterday are typically 'longer' so the problem never seems to come up.
I'm mostly just sharing the argument we already had about it in case it's useful. Personally I'd love to see it be included without worrying about the 'out of dateness' of the time/date.
Mind you, you guys hid the time/date on posts...
Well that wasn't "you guys" so much as Spuds, IIRC. :D I want to have the time and date on show, and move the thread title somewhere innocuous. My preference is to see the time and date above each post, and not have the thread title constantly shoved in my face (particularly when it is infested with that "response prefix").
Ouch .... did anyone get the plate number of that bus that I was thrown under :'(
Actually you did have the time and date above the post, but after a few "suggestions" about that (not from me), and your statement that you had added back the subject on your test site .... well I added it back here to see if that was better or not. The hover over text was changed to the reply # and post time.
Anyway all just testing for what is the most useful data to display, or used most often so its available first. Personally I don't think I'd hide any of that information anyway.
I like seeing the time on a post too. As for the reply number, I don't mind leaving that on the subject title.
Are you saying instead of the subject or along with the subject ?
;D drives bus away into the sunset
Hey one thing I did do a while back is remove the dastardly response prefix from my site. I had a cunning plan.
If you ask people their opinion on it, they'll give you their opinion. This usually varies from "Hate the thing - kill it with fire!" to "Umm, well I kinda like having an indication to make it clear that the fifteenth post on the page I'm looking at isn't the OP of the thread, y'know?".
So, what I did was just remove it, everywhere, without telling anyone. I did this around Christmas. So far, there has not been one question or complaint. Not one, in over a month of constant usage on a live site. :P
The response prefix is something I've not been happy with for a while but I have yet to figure out how to answer 'but I like seeing the subject and seeing that it's a reply, not the opening post', similar but not quite the same, especially when you're coming from search results or recent posts or similar.
I do find the lack of time a bit sparse, and if it is going to stay in a tool tip, you probably should strip the <strong> tag from Today items ;)
Well, I found the way to answer it. Just ditch the damned thing without asking for opinions. Seems to work a treat. Like I said, not a single complaint or question, even though the change was made absolutely everywhere and without any warning.
That's all well and good until you're not the only person with access to change the files back ;) And the other person likes having the differentiation (and will review the changes)
There is actually a bigger consequence of not having the prefix, actually, you get to save a ton of random performance stuff by simply not having to figure out the $txt['response_prefix'] given the language juggling that goes on.
Yup on the <strong> thing :P ... I just don't know why Ant insists on hiding all that markup in the sources.
Oh I'm aware of the overhead benefits of ditching it. They're a nice extra, but weren't my primary motivation. Still, I'm all for saving overhead when it's incurred by crap I don't want anyway.
My point about the change was that even those who claim that the prefix is necessary/useful/awesomesauce/whatever don't really seem to miss it at all when it's not available. I have had the discussion before on the same forum quite some time ago, and at the time there were some objections to removing the prefix, so I decided to see what would happen if I just went ahead. I expected at least one complaint or question about it, but it hasn't happened. My impression is that it's one of those things that people will feel compelled to give an opinion about, if and only if they are directly asked for said opinion.
Eh, that's one of Unknown's from back in the day; timeformat() has always done that.
I think you're right about that, you know.
I did have another idea, which would reduce the amount of overhead, would satisfy my desire for less visual clutter*, and would still provide lost sheep with a GPS to guide them home. :D
It would be better to indicate not the responses, but the OP. That way, the conditional wont be applied the vast majority of the time, so you wont have the overhead of hunting through languages stuff all the time. It also vastly reduces the amount of visual clutter, since only a few posts will get the indicator. Even better if the indicator can be made language-agnostic.
*Two things here. First is that I just dislike having the extra text everywhere when I regard it as unnecessary. Second thing is that personally I find the prefix an obstruction. If I want to know which topic a post is in, that means I want the thread title. Anything that gets in the way of that is just blocking the information I want. IOW, I find the prefix to be actually detrimental.
Ha. :P
That's another thing I removed. First day I did it, a couple of people said that they preferred it when the Today and Yesterday were bold. I suggested that they use it for a couple of days, and then grumble again if they still didn't like the normal font weight. They didn't bother grumbling again, so I assume they don't regard it as a problem.
Although I understand the reason for emphasising that text, in practice people usually use things like recent posts or the unread pages. That means that the actual timestamp is not as important, since on an active site all content on those pages is likely to be today or yesterday anyway. So, the conditional for bold text becomes irrelevant.
Time is pretty important - much more so if the re: is included or not, or which # response it is. If you want to keep any sense of timespan of a discussion, you have to have it present at all times. Unless you want people talking to weeks old posts like they were made 2 minutes before.. :P
About the "2 seconds ago"..it might seem a bit odd, but unless something is indicating a active refresh I think most will "get" that it isn't 2 seconds ago for long. And..a very visible timestamp WILL of course quickly show that too. ;D
@ Ant: Yes, that's true but you still have to apply the conditional everywhere that might have the prefix, because if it isn't "is reply", it's "is OP", either way that conditional is still present.
@ Bloc: Yup, that's also a valid observation. I actually find it a bit weird replying to some topics where I don't have a sense of how old the discussion is without having to actively find out.
Oh I definitely like the timestamp clearly visible. I'd much prefer that to the title, if I had to choose betweeen the two.
What I ended up doing in my test theme was to have the title floated over to the right, in fairly pale, normal weight text. I only use it as an occasional reminder anyway, so that seemed the best option. If I do happen to forget which tab/thread I'm in I can glance over for a quick reminder. The rest of the time (most of the time) it's out of the way and unobtrusive.
And yes I get that the OP-or-not conditional would have to be checked all the time anyway. It would still save some overhead (languages stuff, HTML, etc) compared to the current way of doing things.
I find it funny that such a big deal has been made about this : "Re:".....
I've often changed the subject in my reply to indicate that I'm referring to a specific question in one post. I bet people would equally not scream if you added the prefix back too Ant.
Time stamp is definitely important.
/me hates topic resurrections....
They probably wouldn't scream, but it's not going to happen. I totally hate the thing. :D
Dragging this out, as it seems that relative time was implemented at some point.
Can I request a small modification to it? Instead of just having the relative time, can the exact time be loaded but not displayed by default (like on hover over the 5 months ago stuff).
Also, at some point, fuzzy time becomes really too fuzzy, I'm not sure if there's already something in code as a cutoff date, but anything older than, say, 6-12 months looks really weird (in a year, everything will be A year ago and that will really mess with my mind).
Yep, makes sense.. I'm going to check this..
"a year ago" or "x years ago" is the current implementation. Can split it into a more detailed version, for example "2 years and 7 months ago"..
It would make more sense to just dividing into years+months. When in months too, makes sense to include weeks. Then in week: days as well..as so on.
I've tried relative time in theme-work before, and found that for me it works better to at least show one extra time period. Otherwise it gets, as Elinana says it, too fuzzy very quickly. :D But of course, you lose some of the simpleness by adding to the sentence, though IMO not much.
For me "just now" is really too uncertain. I would rather see "3 seconds ago"(of course adding fast if you have the page up long) than "just now".
One cool effect could of course be a simple javascript counter(adding to the time as real time moves on)/timer on the smallest dates, like within 1 hour for example. Or it could even be a setting for that.
Hey, you need to fix avatars-by-link..my avvy bleeds out. :D
EDIT: just made it smaller, to 150px instead of 200px, its from gravatar. So I can at least see what I am writing lmao.
Is fixed in latest PR stuffz. :P
https://github.com/emanuele45/Dialogo/commit/c18d51e3f782112351440a79c23b49ed4ca4cc2d O:-)
:+1:
/me want's emojis in Elk