Not been able to practice as much as I would have liked recently, so I only noticed it a few days ago.

The dates on the progress page all have the format MONTH/DAY. Is it possible to swith that to the local standard? It each time takes me a few seconds to figure out what is meant...

David

I was going to make the same request. It seems absurd to me that there is now a range of mother tongue languages offered, including the main European ones, yet the date is still stuck in its original US-specific format.

Considering the advanced features already used by the site, surely it would be an easy option to develop?

Perhaps this could be on the "do on Friday afternoon if you feel like it" list though?

for me it is not on the "cut the red wire or the world will explode" list. But sometime within the forseeable future it would be nice:)

I sympathize. I think for a lot of people who aren't in the US, seeing this sort of US-specific stuff is potentially very confusing and often annoying as it symbolizes an unthinking US-centrism. It goes the other way, too: the other day I used the FIFA web site and was momentarily confused by their European-style dates.

Sure I'll put this on the list of things to do.

Actually, that format shows up on the list page for when you've completed a section as well, so we'll just add an option to the general settings, rather than on the progress page itself. No one seemed to mention the formatting was confusing there, though, and it's been that way for a long time. I guess the progress page is used a lot more!

I would agree that US date format is no good but the solution I would pick rather than an option is Chinese/Japanese style date formats (e.g. 2010.07.13) as everybody on the site should be OK with Chinese/Japanese formats and avoiding extra options is a good thing.

@scott @doug Why wouldn't you use the user's locale settings? That would be the JavaScript Date.toLocaleDateString() method. Then you don't need to add an extra option and you don't need to further confuse people with Chinese/Japanese style.

If people want their computer to produce Chinese/Japanese style dates, they will have set their computers up in that locale. For anybody else it would be a surprise.

James

@Doug, that format is too big for both of the places it would be used. On list pages, the year is two digits, and on the progress page the year isn't shown at all (the given space for the auto generated graphs is just too small).

@James, I didn't know of that Javascript function. But there again, we run into a similar problem; the string is too long to fit into the given spaces. And since that function is meant only for human viewing, not scripting based on, it would be pretty hacky and probably incorrect to try and figure out which order to put the numbers based on its output. It's completely up to the browser what and how the numbers are printed.

I don't see it as a bother. Am quite used to seeing it online now, and can only commiserate with Americans for sticking with its peculiar order.