Standardized Date Format in Titles [23 Feb 2016]

[Probus]

I love how developers are putting the date of release (or the date of latest release) in the titles of the threads.  But since KSP is such a worldwide phenomenon, the different date formats can be confused.  May I suggest we use the KSP Forum date notation inside brackets [ ] as a standard:

[Day Month(3 letter abbreviation) Year]

Examples:

[3 Nov 2016]

[11 Dec 2016]

[10 Feb 2016]

Its not a big deal, but it may be just a touch more user friendly.

[stratvox]

I would think the ISO standard (ymd) makes more sense, if only because it permits easy sorting by date; to wit: 2016-02-24 and 2016-02-18 are far more easily sorted than dmy are.

[Probus]

Just now, stratvox said:

I would think the ISO standard (ymd) makes more sense, if only because it permits easy sorting by date; to wit: 2016-02-24 and 2016-02-18 are far more easily sorted than dmy are.

Normally I would agree with you @stratvox, but 1) we have no need to sort the titles and 2) using abbreviated months gives the average user a much easier time recognizing the date.

[stratvox]

16 minutes ago, Probus said:

Normally I would agree with you @stratvox, but 1) we have no need to sort the titles and 2) using abbreviated months gives the average user a much easier time recognizing the date.

Sure, but a couple of things: one, just because I use numbers instead of abbreviations doesn't change the basic idea, and two, while your format is the one in common usage in the Anglosphere doesn't mean that's true for the rest of the world.

Maintaining easy sort order in computer mediated communications media is generally a Good Idea(tm).

 

[drtedastro]

yymmdd....

all the way.

 

cheers.

[Stone Blue]

As someone who keeps an extensive mod tracking spreadsheet, i can totally appreciate having a standardized format for dates. I have come across several different variations, of course due to international usages, and all numbers is bad, UNLESS you are sorting, AND have ONE set standard...

Since we are not sorting thread titles, AND everyone wants their own familiar standard, I vote for ANY format that uses three letter month abreviation... Doesnt matter what format (ie Feb 24 16, Feb 24 2016, 24 Feb 16, etc...)

But having the month abreviation CLEARLY states for EVERYONE what the actual date is, and is clearly the best compromise for EVERYBODY... Especially for dates when dd/mm can be interpreted as mm/dd, but be totally wrong...

Edited February 24, 2016 by Stone Blue

[hoojiwana]

I started tagging my threads like this a while ago, I opted for [11 Feb] (as an example) because that seemed like the least ambiguous to me. No mixing up days with months, and no year included since I didn't feel that it was relevant with the KSP version that was also present in the title.

Having a pure numbers standard just seems like it'll confuse people who don't know if the standard is dd/mm or mm/dd.

[jkortech]

I vote for the ISO standard (as per xkcd).

I actually use ISO for as many things as I can.  Makes life much easier.

 

[Stone Blue]

51 minutes ago, jkortech said:

I vote for the ISO standard (as per xkcd).

Too funny... Thats what I decided to use, (basically, tho I use yy-mm-dd, without realising it was an ISO standard), for my spreadsheet, as well as in the filenames for mod .zips that I have, that do not have a clear "official" version number...

[Streetwind]

6 hours ago, stratvox said:

Maintaining easy sort order in computer mediated communications media is generally a Good Idea(tm).

Except that it doesn't matter which date format you pick here. You can't sort by it. Not "better" or "worse" than this or that format, but simply not at all, period. The forum does not possess this ability. The only remotely applicable sorting option to this would be "by Title", and that will not give you the result you seek.

Try it: let a computer algorithm sort the following entries, which all use the ISO format, by title.

"[1.0.5] This is my mod thread, updated 2016-01-13!"
"Superduper Rocketworks [2016-02-10]"
"[1.0.5][2016-01-20][Kopernicus] Yet More New Planets v2.24"
"ARR! - All Real Rockets! (Update 2016-01-29)"

You will not get this sorted in order of most recently updated by a computer no matter which way you turn it. Well, okay, perhaps one might write an algorithm which parses text for ISO dates. However, the usecase we have here is completely constrained to the forum. Mod titles in CKAN don't have dates in them, and neither do they anywhere else except for here, on the KSP forums. As such, the sortability of the date format is completely irrelevant because no usecase exists in which it ever could be sorted.

 

The only useful metric here is easy instant recognition by the reader. And the problem with the ISO format is that it is not unambiguous to those who have not read the ISO standard. To an American, a date written "2016-02-10" has the potential to look confusing. They're used to month-day-year, and this clearly isn't it. So what's it then? Is it year-month-day? Or year-day-month? It's perhaps a reasonable assumption to make for someone from Europe, or for someone who works in IT, that it's the former. But said American might reason "well, the year is written first, so clearly it's just flipped backwards, but the day is always written in the middle anyways". So you can't guarantee that everyone will understand it correctly, because people's backgrounds differ, and if human beings are known for one thing, then it's disagreeing about the interpretation of absolutely everything (as this thread shows ).

But if you wrote the month as letters, you remove all ambiguity in an instant. There's only one four-digit number and one two-digit number remaining, and days cannot be four-digit numbers. It does not matter from which background a person comes, it is impossible to misunderstand that format as long as the person is literate in the first place.

As such, I'm totally with @Probus here. Writing the month as letters is, for this particular usecase, the optimal solution.

Edited February 24, 2016 by Streetwind

[drtedastro]

Knew this one was going to be great fun.

Like herding cats...

An option, just an idea to ponder, keep the info in set order. then the mixing of numbers, letters, symbols and vapor can all be sorted by parse then sort.

Again, option only for using up some of the black dots available here;

mod name (alpha-numeric); version (decide on a set format..oh boy that will be fun); date machine (numbers) and then date for the "june july / mon tue" types.

It does not matter, just allow for what is needed, as show in the above examples; but set ridged allotment of what goes where and what format it is to be.

 

Ok, I know that will whip up a froth of kat spit, so I am done and gone.

have fun, y'all.

Cheers.

[Farix]

It would be impossible to enforce a date standard in article titles. For one, most of the players are from the US and would be more accustom to the date format there, so they will naturally prefer to use MONTH DD, YYYY format and wonder why anyone would force another standard onto them. Euros will feel the same way if you try to enforce the US date format on them.

So long as dates are understandable and easily readable, it shouldn't matter which date format is used.

[Probus]

I didn't suggest we try to force anything.  I was just looking for a default standard that people could use to eliminate the differences in numeric date formats.

[Stone Blue]

1 hour ago, Streetwind said:

Except that it doesn't matter which date format you pick here. You can't sort by it. Not "better" or "worse" than this or that format, but simply not at all, period. The forum does not possess this ability. The only remotely applicable sorting option to this would be "by Title", and that will not give you the result you seek.

Try it: let a computer algorithm sort the following entries, which all use the ISO format, by title.

"[1.0.5] This is my mod thread, updated 2016-01-13!"
"Superduper Rocketworks [2016-02-10]"
"[1.0.5][2016-01-20][Kopernicus] Yet More New Planets v2.24"
"ARR! - All Real Rockets! (Update 2016-01-29)"

You will not get this sorted in order of most recently updated by a computer no matter which way you turn it. Well, okay, perhaps one might write an algorithm which parses text for ISO dates. However, the usecase we have here is completely constrained to the forum. Mod titles in CKAN don't have dates in them, and neither do they anywhere else except for here, on the KSP forums. As such, the sortability of the date format is completely irrelevant because no usecase exists in which it ever could be sorted.

 

The only useful metric here is easy instant recognition by the reader. And the problem with the ISO format is that it is not unambiguous to those who have not read the ISO standard. To an American, a date written "2016-02-10" has the potential to look confusing. They're used to month-day-year, and this clearly isn't it. So what's it then? Is it year-month-day? Or year-day-month? It's perhaps a reasonable assumption to make for someone from Europe, or for someone who works in IT, that it's the former. But said American might reason "well, the year is written first, so clearly it's just flipped backwards, but the day is always written in the middle anyways". So you can't guarantee that everyone will understand it correctly, because people's backgrounds differ, and if human beings are known for one thing, then it's disagreeing about the interpretation of absolutely everything (as this thread shows ).

But if you wrote the month as letters, you remove all ambiguity in an instant. There's only one four-digit number and one two-digit number remaining, and days cannot be four-digit numbers. It does not matter from which background a person comes, it is impossible to misunderstand that format as long as the person is literate in the first place.

As such, I'm totally with @Probus here. Writing the month as letters is, for this particular usecase, the optimal solution.

Umm... I thought all that is what I said?... LOL

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, Streetwind said:

"[1.0.5] This is my mod thread, updated 2016-01-13!"
"Superduper Rocketworks [2016-02-10]"
"[1.0.5][2016-01-20][Kopernicus] Yet More New Planets v2.24"
"ARR! - All Real Rockets! (Update 2016-01-29)"

Looks like we need to standardize where to put the version and dates in thread titles as well. I'm only partially joking. Actually I'm not joking at all. I suggest:

[1.0.5][2016-02-10] ModName - Tagline

Or whatever date standard is set. I personally prefer year-month-day and know of no "Year-day-month" standard to confuse anybody. Does anybody look at "2016-02-10" and think it may be October 2nd?

[nightingale]

My threads all look like this:

[1.0.5] Contract Configurator [v1.9.6] [2016-02-17]

... and therefore I declare that to be best.  I will never concede on the ISO 8601 date format.

• KSP version first because it's what everyone does, and makes it easy to see
• Name of the mod next because it's the most important thing
• Version number.  With a v to make it obvious what it is (and different than the KSP version identifier) and square brackets because I think it looks best
• ISO 8601 date because it's unambiguous, and visually it's quicker to see than having to mentally parse 3 letter month abbreviations (which may or may not be in your particular native langugage).

That being said, I fully expect every other mod developer and person with an opinion to come say why the way they do it is best.  Also, since we're starting holy wars, vim is better than emacs.

[sarbian]

15 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Except that it doesn't matter which date format you pick here. You can't sort by it. Not "better" or "worse" than this or that format, but simply not at all, period. The forum does not possess this ability.

The forum can sort by first post creation or edit date. And I use it often. "Sort By" => "Start Date"

I like Probus format a bit more since it avoid confusion for the unlucky people who had their brain addled by the imperial system since birth.

 

And I stand by @nightingale on vim.

 

[DuoDex]

emacs

all who disagree will be summarily banned from the forums for life  

---

Seriously, I think that any standardized format would be better than what we have now, which is a massive confusion of thread names, with each author using whatever they think is best. If it was a uniform unpleasantness we could work with it, but confusion is just annoying.

[Streetwind]

2 minutes ago, sarbian said:

The forum can sort by first post creation or edit date. And I use it often. "Sort By" => "Start Date"

Perhaps. But that sorting mode does not truly run off of which date format is used in the title text, does it?

stratvox's argument was that by using the ISO date format in the title text, you could somehow sort forum posts more easily than if people used a combined number/letter format. My argument is that you'll find no sorting mode in which that is true.

[Stone Blue]

14 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

I personally prefer year-month-day and know of no "Year-day-month" standard to confuse anybody. Does anybody look at "2016-02-10" and think it may be October 2nd?

Actually, from keeping an eye on thousands of mods over a couple years... There may not be a standard for it, but YES, I have actually seen MANY dates listed that way... The worst were mods from 2012....

[stratvox]

Hehehe... reminding me of editor holy wars back on usenet!

[Kerbart]

10 hours ago, nightingale said:

My threads all look like this:

[1.0.5] Contract Configurator [v1.9.6] [2016-02-17]

... and therefore I declare that to be best.  I will never concede on the ISO 8601 date format.

...but pointless because it is using alphabetical ordering, not numerical. So I'd recommend using double digits with leading zeroes, just in case your (or Squad's) version numbering runs into the double digits:

[1.0.05] Contract Configuratator [v1.09.06] [2016 02 17]

Also dashes between the dates is fairly arbirtary, so I propose spaces instead. Aside from that your idea has merit.

[nightingale]

39 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

...but pointless because it is using alphabetical ordering, not numerical. So I'd recommend using double digits with leading zeroes, just in case your (or Squad's) version numbering runs into the double digits:

[1.0.05] Contract Configuratator [v1.09.06] [2016 02 17]

Personally, I see no need for the extra zeros - there's no reason that these version numbers need to sort, and it looks odd to me.  More importantly, the KSP version is 1.0.5 - not 1.0.05, 1.05 or anything else.  Squad gets to decide that.  I don't agree with a lot of the version numbering choices that they've made (0.25 => 0.90, 1.0.1 should've been 1.1, 1.0.3 should've been 1.2, and so forth), but that doesn't mean I'm going to go and add to the confusion by trying to change it.

Now, if we're talking standards, then lets talk standards.  Most of the version numbers used either loosely or explicitly follow Semantic Versioning.  From the linked page, emphasis mine:

Quote

2.  A normal version number MUST take the form X.Y.Z where X, Y, and Z are non-negative integers, and MUST NOT contain leading zeroes. X is the major version, Y is the minor version, and Z is the patch version. Each element MUST increase numerically. For instance: 1.9.0 -> 1.10.0 -> 1.11.0.

 

42 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

Also dashes between the dates is fairly arbirtary, so I propose spaces instead. Aside from that your idea has merit.

Again, the dashes are hardly arbitrary, they are part of the standard.  See ISO 8601.  The format is YYYY-MM-DD.

[Probus]

Wow guys.  You are really serious about this stuff.  That's wonderful.  Reminds me of some of my engineers in meetings.

But I just wanted it to match the Forum's dates. KISS.  The YYYY MM DD is probably the best if we don't want to use abbreviations.  Anyway, its just a suggested format.  No one HAS to use it.

[sarbian]

It is too late @Probus you unleashed the dogs of war. Eternal battle shall now wreak havoc on our threads.