As a developer who is just starting to frequently use the forums, it’s extremely easy to accidentally necrobump things you thought were new posts. I don’t know why the year is abbreviated, but it is ambiguous with dates. e.g. “July 21” is the 21st of July, but “July '21” is July 2021. I can easily see posts being necrobumped accidentally due to this (I did it myself not too long ago).
This would improve the experience by preventing necrobumps, and making it less easy to make the mistake of necrobumping, and make it easier for new users to process the date of devforum posts.
If you don’t see what I mean still, here is an example.
Before:
If people are clearly already blind to this huge blue banner that shows up to the side when you start writing the post, the difference between “July '22” and “July 2022” is not going to matter.
Maybe the warning for said blue box should be the same as the classification of necro-bumping- looks like it doesn’t appear for things around 2 years or so old, which classifies as necro-bumping.
Nevertheless, this would still be a great change for readers imo. Right now the only difference between July 14th and July 2014 is one apostrophe (represented as Jul 14 and Jul '14 respectively).
It’s easy to filter out that scroll-bar when the topic isn’t long enough to scroll. This is a very basic change.
It’s just better readability, why are you opposed to this?
I’m not especially against it, I just think you can already tell if the message is old by looking at the same scroll bar as on the images I sent. The bar is also easy to access since we just need to look to the right and it will already show the date if the post is one year old.
Yeah I see your point- it’s just hard for me to differentiate it while reading. I shouldn’t need to think “oh wait is this july 2021 or july 21st” when reading a post- which is something I do incredibly freqeuntly as of right now. I don’t always look at the scroll bar when replying quickly to things either, and I’m sure that others don’t.
This has been annoying me on the devforum for quite a while, and I decided to post it here. It’s pretty annoying. I am aware of the scroll bar.
When there’s a single quote in front of the 2 numbers, you know it represents the year. When there isn’t a single quote there, it doesn’t represent the year.
This honestly isn’t that hard to understand and remember in my opinion.
It’s such a basic change, it’s just readability. I don’t think anyone relies on this abbreviation to read the devforums, and it’s a net good. It’s very easy to skip over the small ’ which is like, 6 pixels. Especially on mobile. It’s very easy to miss for a notable amount of people I’m sure, and this wouldn’t negatively impact anyone.
I just don’t know why it’s hard to remember when there’s a clear sign that it’s old AND that you get a warning when you’re about to reply to a old post.
AFAIK, not a lot of people have complained that it’s hard to see. You’re the only one I’ve seen who’s had trouble with this.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a Discourse feature. Meaning that you should make a feature request in meta.discourse.org unless there’s a setting I’m aware of that can change this.
They may be the first person to actually acknowledge what caused them to make a mistake and made a feature request about it, bear in mind. A lot of people necrobump because discourse is reckless with surfacing old topics.
The real issue though is that people are clearly ignoring the necrobump banner in the post composer, so the impact of this change is definitely limited. Best we can really do is change the threshold for when the necrobump banner appears, the impact would be similar. However, IMO 2 years is within reasonable margin for a bump if necessary, at least for anything that isn’t a support topic or a bug report.
I’m fairly certain it isn’t a Discourse feature, perhaps make a feature request on meta.discourse.org? On a forum where I have admin, I can’t see any way to change this.
I don’t see an issue with the current system as it is, considering there is a single quote to denote a year, rather than a day.
Give them a hearty spank and send them on their way.
For real though, users either don’t read it because it’s a word wall (can increase visibility and decrease text density?), or they ignore it possibly because they don’t understand an old topic is not valuable to bump for any number of reasons, which in that case nothing can be done.
I didn’t actually get the necrobump banner- I believe it’s because the necrobump banner isn’t what actually classifies as necrobumping, but when I replied to a year-old post it did not appear. Hence why I made the mistake in the first place.
Maybe the real solution is to make the necrobump banner more sensitive
This banner does not appear on the mobile-view of Discourse.
I have personally not even seen the banner when looking at preview-mode on the DevForum app.
For some reason tapping the date on mobile gives the date with an abbreviated year, the day is provided however so this menu wouldn’t be prone to mistake.
