Timestamp Bugs

July 10, 2006 7:56 AM

Bug: Recent Activity timestamps are wrong. E.g., I'm now (10:55AM US/Eastern) looking at recent activity on my Ask MeFi post "What does 'Only In Theatres' mean? (Ask MeFi)", and I see "15 total comments, last 10 shown below" - and all of them say "This Morning" except the last one. In reality many of them are from before midnight, either US/Eastern or UTC.
posted by dmd to Bugs at 7:56 AM (4 comments total)

Yeah, there are a bunch of relative timestamps, and one of them is for 6-12 hours and for some reason I applied "this morning" to it which is just a best guess.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:39 AM on July 10, 2006

But morning starts at midnight. If the article is after midnight, say "this morning". If it's before midnight, say "last night".

Personally I don't see what's wrong with using timestamps. I'd much rather see the actual times than try to compute relative times.
posted by dmd at 11:05 AM on July 10, 2006

But morning starts at midnight. If the article is after midnight, say "this morning". If it's before midnight, say "last night".

Then I'd have to calculate that based on your timezone and that's a lot of processing for very little gain.

I'll just change it to "several hours ago" to make it easy.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:37 PM on July 10, 2006

a lot of processing for very little gain

I hear you. I've worked with datetime stuff a lot and it's a bitch and a half to get right.
posted by dmd at 3:53 PM on July 10, 2006