OK, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
SI's search can't find selected text in messages from "last Tuesday", because there is no way to enter "last Tuesday" into the search or into the extended search parameters. You can enter one item from a list of specific years in the "select search year" option (like 2009), but that will simply restrict the search to messages within the year 2009.
If you put "last Tuesday" into the "Enter your search words" box, with no year selected, any post containing BOTH words ("last" and "Tuesday") would be returned in the results.
If you also select "2009" in the "select search year" option, then SI's search would find all messages within the year 2009 that have BOTH "last" and "Tuesday" in them.
What I was saying before is that the phrase "last Tuesday" is not interpreted as "09/16/2014". So, you, the user, would have to know what the date (in MM/DD/YY format) "last Tuesday" is before you do the search.
It works the way I would expect it to if you do a general text search. I would be quite surprised if it actually found "09/16/2014" if you entered "last Tuesday" in the "Enter your search words" box.
The issue I was referring to with the "Ctrl-F" (Windows browsers) is searching for a specific date in the SubjectMarks page itself. With the new "prettified" format, if you were looking for a post from "09/16/2014", you would have to search for "last Tuesday", which means you would have to look at a calendar to determine which day "09/16/2014" fell on. Note that this search is done within the browser itself, and has nothing to do with SI's search.
But, there is also some more confusion to the issue ... there was a "Tuesday" in this week already. So, is "last Tuesday" the Tuesday earlier in this week, or is it the *prior* Tuesday (ie: "09/09/2014")? Yes, I know it's the *prior* Tuesday, but only from empirical evidence. A beginning user might not know how to make that determination.
The MM/DD/YY format alleviates all those confusion factors.
If people refer to "last Tuesday" in their posts as text, and then 6 weeks from now somebody reads that post, they would have to do the same interpretation as I mentioned above to determine what calendar date "last Tuesday" was referring to.
As it is now, the display format changes from a day name to a month name if you go back a week (or two?). Like, September 11. It keeps that format for the rest of the current year.
The format then shifts back to the *expected* date format after the year changes to something other than the current year ... like, 12/31/2013.
Whatever, the old date/time format is more consistent, much easier to use and less error prone. I want it back.
It's funny (kind'a) that such a simple concept becomes such a complex issue. But, none of this would have happened if *experienced* developers had been consulted prior to the changes.
Have I mentioned lately that the user is ALWAYS right?
Sure is a pretty day.
TED |
