Hi! I find the way discourse displays dates extremely annoying. E.g. Oct '16 vs Oct 16; the quote is just not visible enough. Do you have control over this? Please switch to the more verbose ISO 8601 date formats (e.g. 2016-08 or 2016-08-01) or at least write the full year out. Thanks 
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We don’t have much control locally here to my knowledge. I do agree with you — but also note that it’ll show the ISO date on hover.
This is an upstream issue for https://meta.discourse.org…
Oh sweet I was wrong and they do support changing it!
I’ve changed the format from Nov '20 to Nov 2020 in cases where there’s no day shown.
In addition to being shown on the posts themselves, this is also shown in places where we’re constrained in text length (like the date slider), but I think this is a good change. Happy to consider tweaking things further.
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Thank you, this makes me happy and things clearer
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Just as an update, we suspect the short form of “Mar 20” led to a moderator at Hacker News to mistake the day for the year… and so they added a (2020) tag to Ronan’s great post. I added ordinal postfixes to that recent date format following a suggestion there, so now the two appear as “Nov 2020” vs “Nov 20th.” Hopefully this helps more!
Feedback is always appreciated and welcome.
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That is definitely an improvement.
But why not the best seller: dd-Mmm-yyyy?
YT, on 26-Mar-2021
Discourse does use that format in some cases. The number of formats they use, in fact, is rather wild:
That’s about a third of them. Sometimes they have a year, sometimes they don’t. Some are slated as being “tiny” others “medium” others “large”. Using too big of a text in a slot they expect a little text can break some themes. So, yeah, it’s a rats nest and I’m loathe to make huge changes.
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I think this is the kind of thing that always ends up on bikeshedding. I, for example, prefer yyyy-mm-dd, or 2021-03-26, because it is already in lexicographical order, because I prefer to deal with months as numbers instead of names, and because when the year is first people often correctly assume the month is second, while if the year is last, then there are two strong conventions day first and month first, rendering lots of dates ambiguous.
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