As you can see, the forums have a new time format. Now, instead of time being something like 'Today, 3:00' it says '1 Hour Ago'.
The reason for the change is because I am realizing more than ever what a huge, global community we are. And by far, the majority of our traffic are unregistered guests who don't have the ability to specify a timezone. Therefore, all times for unregistered users are in EST, my local timezone.
But I realized that doesn't really make sense. Because suppose Davey comes to DaniWeb and he sees that nothing was posted in the past 7 hours. That could be a major turn-off! And in reality, posts might have just been made minutes ago.
Therefore, I think that keeping times relative helps everyone.
I noticed it nearly immediately when I logged onto DaniWeb. The change is a good one, and helps even when you have the timezone set correctly. In the past, I always had to look at the current time to figure out how long ago a particular entry was posted. This feature is a good improvement.
Absolute times do add a detail that relative times do not. For example, a stale "Who's Online" page. It says Joe Blow is looking at my post 1 minute ago. Oh, but that was a "Who's Online" from 3 hours ago.
Absolute time may have told my 5:10 for both. This I have learned to recognize and use. This addition is, for me, another inconvenience.
There is more than this one way that it affects me negatively, but I don't feel my opinion makes any difference such that thoughtfully enumerating them would do much.
"A stopped clock is right twice a day". A relative clock may not have that going for it.
Last edited by Dave Sinkula; Feb 9th, 2007 at 1:45 am.
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