sillsdev / sillsdev/languageforge-lexbox

Relative durations ("5 minutes ago") should allow hovering / tapping to view absolute date

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💻 FW Lite UI Design
Dominant language
C#
Stars
9
Forks
8
Avg merge
2d 13h
Merged PRs (30d)
49

Description

Describe the feature
Looking at the activity log for the sena-3 project, I see a list of dates like this:

  • 4d 18h 28m 45s ago
  • 2s before
  • 2s before

Relative dates are useful, but sometimes it's nice to be able to see the exact time when something happened rather than how long ago it was. For example, that top event that happened 4 days and 18 hours ago... that was July 25th. 4 days ago was July 26th, but 4 days and 18 hours ago was late afternoon on July 25th. If I'm trying to figure out when the entry was changed, it's sometimes more useful to be able to see that it happened at 4 PM on July 25th than that it happened 4 days and 18 hours ago. (When I tried to calculate it mentally, I ended up at July 26th at first and said "Wait, I wasn't working on a Saturday" before realizing that 18 hours ago is 3/4 of a day, so that was really July 25th in the late afternoon or early evening).

It would be nice if pages that display a lot of dates, like the activity log, had a toggle to switch between relative and absolute times, and on mouseover (and on a tap event for mobile users) it would show the "other" one. If the toggle is selecting relative times, then a tap on "4 days 18 hours ago" would switch that to show "July 25th at hh:mm". If the toggle is selecting absolute times, then tapping on "July 25th at hh:mm" would show "4 days 18 hours ago". Mousing over would show a tooltip with the same info.

Who is this feature for?
All users

Pages affected
Activity log, and maybe other places as well. There should be a setting in the user settings page (NOT the project settings) where people could select the default way to show dates (relative or absolute), and pages with LOTS of dates could also have a toggle on the page itself. That toggle would NOT change the user's settings, but WOULD be set on initial page load from the user's preferred settings.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the activity log and user-settings entry points that render dates, then trace how relative dates are produced and identify other date-heavy pages. Done means users can choose a default relative or absolute format, date displays can show the alternate value on hover or tap, and page-level toggles follow the user's preference without changing it.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp
Domain
frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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