~Originally posted by titanmelon

Requested feature overview description.
An option to change times on e6 from relative to absolute
e.g - Immediately after posting this suggestion, its timestamp would say 0 seconds ago
Instead of Apr 16, 2016

Why would it be useful?
Bit of a pain trying to figure out when a post/forum was made at a glance, especially older ones

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?
Everywhere/Date Times

I agree it would be most useful. Honestly I am used to more places using absolute over relative. As a simple user option, I am thinking it would be a good implementation to consider.

Mentioning this here too for convenience:

Date format options would be neat as well, but probably not strictly necessary

• eg. UTC, UT, local time relative to UTC (+1, -4 etc)

-
Then the really optional ones like

• Sidereal time, Solar time etc,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_standard

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You could take this even further and include different year numbering systems,

Since (TMK) we're already using a variant of unix time,

but that might get complicated when people are trying to list dates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform

As an add-on to OP: Clicking on dates would swap relative/absolute (with default being a user option). The problem with this feature is that dates are often hyperlinked, so not sure how to incorporate both ideas, except for adding an extra "button" next to the date for the swap functionality.

Why?: It's a fairly neat feature, since I often like relative dates, but sometimes I want to know the exact date for various reasons, usually involving comparing with some other date related to the object in question. And the default title hovering functionality is generally a terribly useless UI feature.

Where: Well, everywhere, as OP refers to.

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@titanmelon, agrees, time zone localization feel like it would pretty much be a must if absolute time is used even as a user selected default. However it might make communication about dates harder (if that is ever the case).

Chessax said:
As an add-on to OP: Clicking on dates would swap relative/absolute (with default being a user option).

What about having both. Like:

Apr 28, 2015 (1 year ago)

or:

Apr 28, 2015
1 year ago

I don't honestly think exact time is necessary, but having day, month, and year would be quite handy.

Chessax said:
so not sure how to incorporate both ideas, except for adding an extra "button" next to the date for the swap functionality.

You could have the button hidden and seen only when you hover over the date, and the button is this:

🕒

U+1F552

\uD83D\uDD52

Lance_Armstrong said:
U+1F552

That doesn't even work for me. U+ codes are nonexistant for my keyboard.

Furrin_Gok said:
That doesn't even work for me. U+ codes are nonexistant for my keyboard.

That's the Unicode identifier for that character. It allows you to make an entity: 🕒 or look it up in Unicode list documents.

Wodahseht said:
I don't honestly think exact time is necessary, but having day, month, and year would be quite handy.

Why not? It's not like it's going to take much space anyway, or just give us a formatting field and people can format their dates however they like.

Furrin_Gok said:
That doesn't even work for me. U+ codes are nonexistant for my keyboard.

Then you either have a browser without proper font support or your browser is using a font which doesn't contain that glyph.

As a side note I never really fell for the whole emoji deal... Not sure why.

Chessax said:
Why not? It's not like it's going to take much space anyway, or just give us a formatting field and people can format their dates however they like.

Then you either have a browser without proper font support or your browser is using a font which doesn't contain that glyph.

As a side note I never really fell for the whole emoji deal... Not sure why.

The characters show up when other people include them, or if I copy-and-paste them, but I have no means of entering them. My computer does not support U+ entries, no matter what I try to do. Guides say to enable a certain registry, but that registry just doesn't exist for me.

Furrin_Gok said:
The characters show up when other people include them, or if I copy-and-paste them, but I have no means of entering them. My computer does not support U+ entries, no matter what I try to do. Guides say to enable a certain registry, but that registry just doesn't exist for me.

Ah right, got it, though in this case that shouldn't be much of a problem as long as you're only supposed to view it in this case, and not type it yourself.

Furrin_Gok said:
The characters show up when other people include them, or if I copy-and-paste them, but I have no means of entering them. My computer does not support U+ entries, no matter what I try to do. Guides say to enable a certain registry, but that registry just doesn't exist for me.

Registry entries can be created if they don't exist yet.

Also, what do you mean by 'entering them'? U+ codes aren't meant to be entered manually; the standard way of manually creating Unicode by code on a keyboard is Alt codes, which are the decimal version of U+ codes (which are hexadecimal). For example, the degree symbol (°) is U+00B0, and B0 in decimal is 176), so you hold Alt and type 0176 on the numpad (add a leading zero for technical reasons explained here.

Using the registry, you can enable a direct hexadecimal input mode, which I assume is what you were referring to with the registry. Then you could do Alt + + + b0.