Format of date
 

What is the strange format of date in the forum MM-DD-YY?
Historicaly there was 2 formats.

UK/US: MM/DD/YYYY
German: DD.MM.YYYY

Later was arised compromise known as ISO

YYYY-MM-DD

Never undestand programmers who mixing this format in complex style. :)

Standard format most vBulletin forums use. /shrug

- and / is used both about the same in the US.

I, personally, hate all of those, for pretty much exactly what is said in here. All of them are too ambiguous. Are those two two-digit numbers in month/day format, or day/month format (unless one of the numbers is greater than 12)? ([God] help you if you are also using a two-digit year representation as well, and it, too is less than or equal to 12). That's why you will find that I will, any time where it is up to me, use dd/month abbreviation spelled out/year. 01 Sep 2014 is only one character longer than 01/09/2014, but there is no question what date I am talking about.

I was working on a google spreadsheet for a while, around 30-40 people were entering data to there and using it as a remote database. One day, while performing maintenance on that spreadsheet, I saw some dates entered in different format. Then later on, I realized that more than half of them were in different formats, totalling around at least 4 different formats.

Had to purge some of the data, and adjust the rest after asking people which format they use in their country. Wish we had global variables for all of these units, but well, what can you do :P

The YYYYMMDD format allows simpler comparisons where larger numbers are always later than smaller numbers. Thus, 20131201 (dec 01, 2013) is always greater than 20101031 (oct 31, 2010). But in other systems, 31102010 > 01122013 but 12012013 > 10312010. It also follows that the least significant digits are the least significant (days, instead of years).

This type of representation is the very basis of our place value number system, even though it uses place values that are not base-10 (containing digits that are base 10!). It is unambiguous and universal, and most importantly, consistent when comparing dates.

If you want strange, look at timezones across the world, and if you figure that out, add in DST.