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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: Website Support
Thread: Date format on Results Status etc. |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 11
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Please change the date format to a more internationally recognized format. Many contributors to this project come from countries other than USA and UK. Most of these countries use a date format that goes like DD.MM.YYYY. Dates like 07/11/2008 lead to major confusion since most people in the world read it as November 7th 2008 instead of July 11th.
Possible solutions: Either change to the DD.MM.YYYY format (which would probably confuse angle-american users) or just use abbreviations for the month to make the date clear i.e. Jul-11-2008. Thanks |
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
Agreed in principle.
----------------------------------------There was some recent discussion on this. If at all, the strongest recommendation is to go for the year/month/day order as some people import the information into their office application and sort it on date.... importing 2008/07/09 would work for most anyone. Abbreviating month names would not work, again due the data import issue and the localization. My spreadsheet wants to see 'Lug' instead of 'Jul' e.g. The RS pages only list tasks up to 4 days after validation and all results returned in the set, speak all 19 for RICE & HPF2, thus 07/11 would be near guaranteed July and not a date in the future or in the longer past (at other projects result lists do often not last 24 hours after validation). Anyway, the quickest way to nirvana, short term, is adding to the header what the format is i.e. MM/DD/YYYY .... maybe the webcoder could fit that in with the upcoming web update build 22. ciao
WCG
Please help to make the Forums an enjoyable experience for All! |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Sekerob,
the YYYY/MM/DD seems to me as a very good compromise. All the big BOINC projects (SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, Climateprediction, etc.) already switched to the format e.g. "15 Jul 2008". Since these are the projects with the highest number of participants this date format appears to have reach broadest consensus. |
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JmBoullier
Former Community Advisor Normandy - France Joined: Jan 26, 2007 Post Count: 3716 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hello Martin P.
----------------------------------------I have reported this problem (introduced by the recent build 21 of the website) in the CA room on June 28 and it has been fixed on June 30. Since that date all dates appear as yyyy/mm/dd in all national versions (French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese). I had not noticed that nelsoc had kept them as mm/dd/yyyy in the English version. I shall report that it causes trouble to all non-US countries which have not yet their national version and maybe he will do something. In the meantime you might select the national language that disturbs you the least when you need to cut/paste them into spreadsheets for example. Cheers. Jean. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello Martin P. I have reported this problem (introduced by the recent build 21 of the website) in the CA room on June 28 and it has been fixed on June 30. Since that date all dates appear as yyyy/mm/dd in all national versions (French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese). I had not noticed that nelsoc had kept them as mm/dd/yyyy in the English version. I shall report that it causes trouble to all non-US countries which have not yet their national version and maybe he will do something. In the meantime you might select the national language that disturbs you the least when you need to cut/paste them into spreadsheets for example. Cheers. Jean. Thanks a lot for the information Jean! BTW: I am a German native speaker and Japanese or Chinese do not really help ;-) |
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JmBoullier
Former Community Advisor Normandy - France Joined: Jan 26, 2007 Post Count: 3716 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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BTW: I am a German native speaker and Japanese or Chinese do not really help ;-) I knew from BoincStats that you are Austrian. But if you can guessread French or Spanish that may help you for the time of collecting stats.  I have asked the tech side if it would be possible to extend the yyyy/mm/dd ISO format to the English version. We will see... Cheers. Jean. |
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richardh9935@gmail.com
Cruncher Joined: Sep 15, 2007 Post Count: 1 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I hoped this thread would say "Yes, being the World Community Grid, it is our policy to follow ISO standards, so we're changing all dates to the ISO standard date-time format of yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss, for all web pages, for all countries."
Instead I discovered that some administrator thought yyyy-mm-dd was appropriate only for non-US aligned countries. Could you please do two things, ASAP. 1. DECIDE to follow ISO standards because we're in the WORLD COMMUNITY GRID, not the USA community grid. 2. ACCEPT the consequences of that decision, and start implementing the ISO standards and W3C standards, particularly those relating to measurement. eg date-time, distance, mass. ie I expect full SI units, too. Signed, Grumpy Old Man, Curtin, Canberra, Australia, (Only metric since 1974.) |
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KerSamson
Master Cruncher Switzerland Joined: Jan 29, 2007 Post Count: 1684 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hello Everybody,
----------------------------------------working the large part of my time in international projects, I use only the ISO format (current issue: ISO 8601:2004) since near to 20 years. In all documents I (co-)author, all dates are mentioned according to ISO 8601. This is also valid for my company web site. This format does not represent a compromise but a very convenient way to specify dates avoiding any kind of mistakes (see for example US, EN). I think that it is simply good practice to use this format. Additionally, software (in particular operating systems) like this format for sorting file names  The three letters formats for the month is not really appropriate, in particular for June and July (into French: JUIn, JUIllet)  Cheers, |
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
Another Grump from Australia, just kidding, but not entirely ;-)
----------------------------------------We have expressed our strongest desire here and in back room what we like, so we'll see. For now, I've set up my queries to pull the data using the "French" customization so for instance my Open Office sheets read all dates and numerical values correctly, without comma / point confusion either. Regrettably the RS pages cannot be pulled in XML, not found a way, but if I look at the global statistics in English and extract the XMLed data I get the "proper" <LastUpdated>2008-07-29T00:06:03</LastUpdated> http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewGlobalHistory.do?xml=true Not so grumpy multilingual from Italy 
WCG
----------------------------------------Please help to make the Forums an enjoyable experience for All! [Edit 1 times, last edit by Sekerob at Jul 29, 2008 10:35:32 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Unforunately, as the website developed, we created more than one way of formatting dates. I am completely with the people in this thread who want yyyy/mm/dd format, and I'll be doing what I can to steer the ship in the right direction as we go.
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