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Relative Time Started by ahrasis · · Read 17289 times 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic. previous topic - next topic

Re: Relative Time

Reply #15 –

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.
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Re: Relative Time

Reply #16 –

Quote from: Spuds – Yup on the <strong> thing  :P  ... I just don't know why Ant insists on hiding all that markup in the sources.
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.
Master of Expletives: Now with improved family f@&king friendliness! :D

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Re: Relative Time

Reply #17 –

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

Re: Relative Time

Reply #18 –

@ 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.

Re: Relative Time

Reply #19 –

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.
Master of Expletives: Now with improved family f@&king friendliness! :D

Sources code: making easy front end changes difficult since 1873. :P

Re: Relative Time

Reply #20 –

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.
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Re: Relative Time

Reply #21 –

They probably wouldn't scream, but it's not going to happen. I totally hate the thing. :D
Master of Expletives: Now with improved family f@&king friendliness! :D

Sources code: making easy front end changes difficult since 1873. :P

Re: Relative Time

Reply #22 –

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).

Re: Relative Time

Reply #23 –

Quote from: Eliana Tamerin – 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).
Yep, makes sense.. I'm going to check this..

Quote from: Eliana Tamerin – 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).
"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"..
Thorsten "TE" Eurich
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Re: Relative Time

Reply #24 –

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.

Re: Relative Time

Reply #25 –

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.

Re: Relative Time

Reply #26 –

Is fixed in latest PR stuffz. :P
Master of Expletives: Now with improved family f@&king friendliness! :D

Sources code: making easy front end changes difficult since 1873. :P

Re: Relative Time

Reply #27 –

Quote from: Arantor – 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.
https://github.com/emanuele45/Dialogo/commit/c18d51e3f782112351440a79c23b49ed4ca4cc2d O:-)
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