Complaint: Forum post dates/timestamps

[xwindows]

but also, is it really that big of a deal?

Yes, because I write quite a number of long (to very-long) technical answers around here; and I do not write answers for just the MelonLand member who asked, I document the root cause and solution of such problems for the general public in long term.

Such technical answers must be taken in context, especially the time context; for viewer to guage if such solution, explanation, or observation was still valid for his use/consideration. Web technologies, especially JavaS'creep/Browser APIs, HTML/MovingGoalpost (HTML5), CSS/MovingGoalpost (CSS3) and browser versions change every few months; when post timestamp is omitted like this, it is nigh-impossible to see if specific suggestion, code or workaround provided in each post worked for which versions-combo of them.

Not just these, I also use the question's and last OP-post's timestamp to determine how much chance the original poster would come back to confirm that the answer worked, or clarify additional details I asked. With the scrambled timestamp, I'm basically at risk of sinking multiple hours (sometimes, days) into researching, testing, and drafting things that would effectively get shouted into the void.

Nobody's forcing you to use it that way!

It is forced on anonymous viewers and archivers.

And I actually browse MelonLand anonoymously most of the time because of my privacy-first browsing regimen; my in-account settings do not take effect there. (Yes, I draft posts days before posting, and only logging in to post them) And it isn't like I could recover this information using CSS overlay; since @Melooon completely omitted them, rather than just hiding them behind hover-`<abbr>` or `title=` attribute.

Are you suggesting that me and other non-members trade session privacy (and personal data, in case of non-member) for the context of each post content?

(And god help them if that someone was actually viewing such answers from Internet Archive or Archive.is in the far future)

Making such omission makes the site dangerously close to the likes of Facebook, ex-Twitter, and other techo-conglomerate social-control platforms that withhold posts' context to coerce viewers to sign up, hand over their data, and get tracked.

This scrambled timestamp on anonymous view specifically, is an antifeature that deters me from going out to answer technical questions around here like I used to. Yes, I'm calling this useless scrambled-timestamp an antifeature. I cannot take the forum seriously with it; please roll it back.

- xwindows (29 Aug 2026 ~15:52 GMT)

[Dan Q]

On consideration, I think @xwindows is correct.

I, too, write long and detailed answers to technical problems and rely on the timestamps to do that. I checked one just earlier today to ensure that I was still likely looking at a version of a page that had a problem.

The strongest argument for me is the archivist one. Having heard it, it makes me less-inclined to write detailed technical things because they feel un-futureproofed. I care a lot about digital archivability!

So yeah; I've been won over from seeing the change as a harmless bit of fun to being a problem. I'd now also like some kind of accessible specific (even if unconventional, e.g. Swatch Time) time visible in posts when shown to anonymous users, too.

(The rest of the argument/comparisons to Facebook, Twitter etc. seemed needlessly hyperbolic and slippery-slope-ish, though!)

[Melooon]

(29 Aug 2026 ~15:52 GMT)

You've essentially found the correct solution here.

argument for me is the archivist one.

What is being discussed is meta-data authority. A timestamp is metadata, or in archival terms, its a provenance - taking out timestamps at the forum level shifts the weight of provenance away from the forum as an authority and into the post as an authority.

At an archeological site, when you dig an object out of the ground, it does not come with a timestamp hovering next to it, you have to study the object; what is its style, does it have a makers mark, what is its decay, what is the context it was found within. Using that information you make an assessment on when it was made, who made it and what it was used for.

Unlike reality, there is an unspoken expectation that a website should dictate provenance, and that a forum owner should act as the authority; mandating and verifying the context of the information you have posted. To stretch the analogy (maybe a bit too far), there's a hint of colonialism to it; your posts are stamped and verified by the forums structure, but that structure also inhibits natural qualities within your posts from developing.

When that structure gets taken away, you are forced to invent something new; do you add your own timestamps to posts? Do you just add a date? Do you date things in US format or UK format? Do you use the christian calendar or the holocene calendar?

Now of course we could compromise here and maybe that will come; I could add a toggle somewhere that let's you switch formats even when logged out - but doing that undermines the interesting part of this whole project. When you can bend the rules every time a game becomes inconvenient, the game becomes pointless.

The point of us all being here, on this silly madly designed forum, that goes against every serious trend on the web, is to try something different. To think something different, to get things wrong, and to learn things along the way.

@Dan Q you were able to hack the chat to inject silly names for everyone, that's a wonderful achievement and it created something that I would have never considered. I'm waiting for people to figure out that moment with time too, when people stop putting their energy into complaining, and start putting it into actually inventing something that works around this time provenance question.

[Dan Q]

@Dan Q you were able to hack the chat to inject silly names for everyone, that's a wonderful achievement and it created something that I would have never considered. I'm waiting for people to figure out that moment with time too

I've tried! But if it's possible, I don't think it's a productive use of my time.
future
I thought I'd found a general-purpose solution already, as I said earlier in the thread. But I think @xwindows raises a valid concern: something unsolved, a genuine problem. (I don't think they expressed it well, but that's another story!)

You've essentially found the correct solution here.

I don't think this solves the problem. The problem isn't "nobody knows when @xwindows posted", it's (a) "@xwindows doesn't know when other people posted without logging in" (that one's not a concern I share: I'm also privacy-conscious, but not to the extent where I browse this forum logged-out!), and (b) "anonymous users are being arbitrarily deprived of potentially-valuable metadata".

Ultimately it's up to you whether you, @Melooon , whether you agree that's a problem (it sounds like you don't) and if so what the solution is. But either way (like every decision about it!), your decision affects how people use the forum.


As I think I've said before, I think there's value in the "fuzzy" timestamping that's currently used. I think it encourages old thread resurrection, and playfully and imaginatively encourages us to think about time in different ways, and injects a levity and curiosity that's often missing on the Web! And the fact that it seemed to be optional meant that I thought it was worthwhile even in spite of the challenges it posed! But now I'm not convinced it's as-optional as I did previously.

My personal preferred solution would be that the "option" could be toggled from the front-end, without an account, or that the deeper metadata were still accessible to everybody, not just logged-in users. Right now, anonymous users get one timekeeping method; registered users get their choice of that or an alternate one.

I use the alternate one, because it's more-useful for me some of the time. But ideally, I'd be able to use both, switching on a thread-by-thread basis perhaps! Or have a default but it can be overridden in-page with a click, or a hover, or something. In general, I more-often prefer the new/default/fuzzy variant, but for the threads where I prefer more-specific, that's the one I have to choose. (Or else I spend the whole time in my settings, flipping back and forth!)

Anyway, that remains where I'm at.

[Melooon]

"anonymous users are being arbitrarily deprived of potentially-valuable metadata".

Ultimately it's up to you whether you, Melooon , whether you agree that's a problem (it sounds like you don't)

I'm less in the business of agreeing or disagreeing, and much more in the business of getting people to talk about it Though I'm aware that's cheeky because I'm playing peoples frustrations as a tool of creative exploration

HOWEVER, regarding the conflict between what people who are logged in should see, verses people who are logged out. Having considered it, you're correct, denying guests access to any information is in conflict with the forums core ideals - that debate already happened here, that's more or less part of the forums constitution, so a solution is needed.

We could resolve it by totally removing timestamps entirely both for logged-in members and guests, but I think that would cause a meltdown  On the question of keeping hidden metadata, that one may be a big job since timestamps are not generated at the HTML level in SMF, unless its scoped to only be in some key places. On the other hand, a toggle would not solve the archive issue unless the archiver explicitly knew to toggle timestamps before making its archive - that rules out any generic archive service from benefiting (though if we restore archive access, we also restore bot access)

[boreal cryptid]

i must say, this format boosts my derealization every time i see it and try to orient myself :(
it's not like the whole forum should accommodate for *me*, but i decided to share anyway, as i am one of the members after all.

this is basically one of the reasons i can't participate much right now.

and even tho there is a setting to change it - it doesn't seem to work for mobile layout - i've change it, but it still says "summer night" :(

maybe as a "light" version it could use "date + time of the day" format? like
"30/08/26, evening" or "august 30, evening"?

[kringle]

also in the vein of compromise, i think a less vague but still happily vague alternative could be season/year. like a cold autumn day, 2024. it still has a sense of time for archival purposes but at a much larger scope. like im a little web farmer tending to my html crops.

that said, my personal 2 cents: i do see the benefits of the sense of mystique that comes from muddying the timeline of an online project but i am also an archivist at heart, i think having the non-specific timestamps as a default is more of a bane then a boon especially since it not only muddies viewing it in the context of the wider internet but also viewing the forum in the context of its own internal history when youre an outside observer (though i understand this is prob intentional). but also i dont think the exact time and date is do-or-die important. i think that the calendar month is prob a fine level of specificity to view these things through without knowing the exact time. we've deff mapped histories on much vaguer terms. and also i dont know your perspective on the issue since im not really sure what happens when we give the bots access to this metadata. i am, afterall, but a humble html farmer plowing the melon-lords fields. 

and even tho there is a setting to change it - it doesn't seem to work for mobile layout - i've change it, but it still says "summer night" :(

i checked this on my computer and phone and didn't experience this issue! seems like this might have been fixed

[Dan Q]

On the other hand, a toggle would not solve the archive issue unless the archiver explicitly knew to toggle timestamps before making its archive

Depends on the nature of the toggle!

My ideal would be for the entire thing to be output something like this:

Code

<time datetime="2026-08-30 09:14" class="post-datetime">
  <details>
    <summary>a Summer night, 2026</summary>
    <span><strong>Today</strong> at 09:14</span>
  </details>
</time>

Perhaps with some CSS to hide the summary when the details are fully expanded? E.g.:

Code

.post-datetime details[open] summary {
  display: none;
}

Or even with the relatively-positioned-click-through trick so you can "toggle" between the date formats by clicking (or the label-checkbox paradigm for the same, but details-summary seems more-semantic in this case: you're literally asking for a specific detailed version of a summarised datetime!)

This could then use the setting of logged-on users to decide whether or not to set <dialog open> initially. But regardless of whether a user had that setting in the default (closed) or alternate (open) state, or even if they weren't logged-in at all, they'd have full access to the date and time in whichever format they prefer (with the default version showing for anonymous users by-default).

That's my proposed solution.

Ninja edit: I would love to help implement this but I had a minor nervous breakdown earlier this month related to, among other things, over-extending myself and taking on too many projects at once and I'm trying to be gentle with myself and minimise committing to anything "new" for a bit.

[boreal cryptid]

also in the vein of compromise, i think a less vague but still happily vague alternative could be season/year. like a cold autumn day, 2024. it still has a sense of time for archival purposes but at a much larger scope. like im a little web farmer tending to my html crops.

actually, good idea!

season + year + (optionally) time of the day format sounds specific enough to avoid feeling of disorientation or time blindness or derealization, at least for me.

also yeah, it seems like this format still keeps original intended vagueness that makes ppl question... um, time, you know?

i checked this on my computer and phone and didn't experience this issue! seems like this might have been fixed

i just realized that i forgot to uncheck Dundee Mode after changing the format, so disregard my previous message, there is no bug 

[grubbyfox]

Such technical answers must be taken in context, especially the time context; for viewer to guage if such solution, explanation, or observation was still valid for his use/consideration. Web technologies, especially JavaS'creep/Browser APIs, HTML/MovingGoalpost (HTML5), CSS/MovingGoalpost (CSS3) and browser versions change every few months; when post timestamp is omitted like this, it is nigh-impossible to see if specific suggestion, code or workaround provided in each post worked for which versions-combo of them.

Not just these, I also use the question's and last OP-post's timestamp to determine how much chance the original poster would come back to confirm that the answer worked, or clarify additional details I asked. With the scrambled timestamp, I'm basically at risk of sinking multiple hours (sometimes, days) into researching, testing, and drafting things that would effectively get shouted into the void.
It is forced on anonymous viewers and archivers.

(And god help them if that someone was actually viewing such answers from Internet Archive or Archive.is in the far future)

Making such omission makes the site dangerously close to the likes of Facebook, ex-Twitter, and other techo-conglomerate social-control platforms that withhold posts' context to coerce viewers to sign up, hand over their data, and get tracked.

This scrambled timestamp on anonymous view specifically, is an antifeature that deters me from going out to answer technical questions around here like I used to. Yes, I'm calling this useless scrambled-timestamp an antifeature. I cannot take the forum seriously with it; please roll it back.

- xwindows (29 Aug 2026 ~15:52 GMT)

I think this post pretty much perfectly put together my thoughts, lol except I'm not the one actually writing and making these well-thought out posts. But this was my concern and I honestly paused going here for a bit due to the timestamps because it just got annoying to not see if a post was ancient and long forgotten or not.

I dont mind "necroing" a thread, not at all. But I would at the very least want to know if I was gonna necro a thread or not.

It wasn't until I read this thread that I realized this feature could be turned off in the settings (why was it set as default anyway?) Please, I am begging that any similar artistic choice is not set as default. It can be a bit difficult to find information here sometimes so whenever there are mayor changes, it gets hard to figure out if there's something I can do make it easier on myself again. (Example; At this point I dont remember which browser/PC I used to block certain fonts here and it was such an annoyance to go through that, that now I just have to ignore any post made with fonts I cant read. Because either the blocking doesnt work anymore or it was on another PC and eughghgh it just ends up a hassle)

Could it not also have been a cosmetic feature on a users end as well? (or maybe it is?) and not like, something that will be acrhived like that? Because xwindows brings up an interesting point. What about archival purposes? Will dates be archived with the actual time and date or not?

And it does in fact remind me of the annoyances with Facebook and Youtube for example, where you can barely find the date on anything anymore. I think at least on Youtube you have to click and click and whatnot in order to see a specific date a video was posted. I'm not sure anything else is properly timestamped. I remember having trouble on FB trying to see a specific date a post was made, but I dont use it enough to claim this is a fact for everything there.

But a thing I really like about things online is that usually it is/was always timestamped properly down to the minute. Which is great when looking back at older sites, posts, archives etc.

30.08.2026 19:23

[Melooon]

I've been thinking about a compromise here and I have ideas:

season + year + (optionally) time of the day format sounds specific enough to avoid feeling of disorientation or time blindness or derealization, at least for me.

like a cold autumn day, 2024. it still has a sense of time for archival purposes but at a much larger scope. like im a little web farmer tending to my html crops.

One of the strongest points people have agreed with in this thread, is that removing time context encourages having discussions across deep time, it stops people from getting scared to post on a very old thread - some people are not scared, but I know from experience that many are. If we add the year back in, essentially that means every post from 21, 22, 23, 24 etc become old posts again - we undo that one benefit that people seem to like.


@Noah_S made a strong point about the value of time being a way marker, and I don't totally relate to it, but it's an view I have heard expressed in other discussions about time that were totally unrelated to this feature. So I think it is an important point. However a waymaker does not need to be a date, it just needs to be a fixed point - I already proposed a solution to that over here, most people ignored it (possibly I didn't explain it well), but I coded most of it anyway   So we can try that out later. 


As I said above, the point about the public/logged-in divide made by Dan and xwindows is annoying because it proves me wrong  However they are both correct, there needs to be a public way to access that information.

@Dan Q thanks for your offer, but dont overwork! To do your solution would mean editing every date line, on every PHP page that generates HTML, repeated across every theme. I don't think that's a stable way. The best clean solution I can see is a url param that swaps dates, plus a link for that url in the right place.


As a whole, firstly I think the artistic question here is really important; the fact that people clearly have strong views on it is proof of that; I think it's far more important than just being a cosmetic feature or a novelty, and I don't want to do anyone a disservice by subjecting you to novelties that I don't think have a deeper value.

Inventing things is very difficult, and its more difficult when you are balancing the creative weight of an art project like this forum, with the social weight of a space that has people in it, who invest their time, and have a right for that time to be respected; its like having your sketch pad shout at you every time you draw a weird line  

That said, I think everyone here has been fair, and they have expressed genuine views and offered ideas and feedback that I'm grateful for. I'd ask simply that you bare with me, I'll tweak things a bit, and see how they sit.

[Dan Q]

You continue to be The. Best, @Melooon. Don't ever let any bickering by opinionated nerds make you forget that.