Steam needs to support international date formats

[WildCat]

If it had not been for the fact that the market warns us that items can no longer be sold/traded for one week, I would have read "Tradable & Marketable After: 4/12/2015" beside my new inventory items as meaning 4th December 2015, given that the UK (and other countries) uses DD/MM/YYYY as its preferred date format.

The U.S. MM/DD/YYYY date format should not be favoured on the Steam interface, it is not a multi-national-friendly format. Perhaps it might be wise for Steam to expand the user options and introduce English (US) and English (British), as well as other English-speaking preferences such as Canada, Australia/NZ, etc. to the settings so that any such messages cannot be misunderstood, as not all users will notice the one week warning and could flood Steam support with "why do I have to wait 9 months to sell this item?" It would also be good customer service to be more diverse; I find having U.S. dates/spellings forced upon me rather obnoxious on a service I pay for and use daily.

More effort would be welcomed for small details such as this. I'm not moaning here.. I'm simply saying that the Steam inferface is not hardcoded to only use one language, and nearly all programming languages include date format functions to output a timestamp, so it shouldn't be hard to update this issue out of respect for the millions of non-U.S. Steam users who don't read dates month first.

Cheers.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by WildCat:

If it had not been for the fact that the market warns us that items can no longer be sold/traded for one week, I would have read "Tradable & Marketable After: 4/12/2015" beside my new inventory items as meaning 4th December 2015, given that the UK (and other countries) uses DD/MM/YYYY as its preferred date format.

A minor annoyance.. would b nice if the steam client could read such options from our OS settings.

[HLCinSC]

I'm from the US and prefer the DD/MM/YYYY format. At least everyone can recognize it as the US format from the 13th to 31st day of any given as those numbers would not be possible in the MM field.

Also I would add that often when times/dates are given for restrictions and such they are given in US Pacific time (where Valve is located) which some customers don't realize and panic when the time passes for them but has not yet passed Valve's time zone.

[WildCat]

Originally posted by #Let Girls Learn #Sunshine Week:

I'm from the US and prefer the DD/MM/YYYY format. At least everyone can recognize it as the US format from the 13th to 31st day of any given as those numbers would not be possible in the MM field

True, but I think people would rather be certain of the date they're reading for all of the month rather than only half of the month. Having your local format displayed means you can never be wrong and won't have to waste time trying to confirm it via customer support. It's simply good practice for a company that uses web technology to recognise these things and be as flexible as possible to avoid confusion.

[Start_Running]

Well if you know the format steam uses it doesn't take more than 10 seconds to remember.

[WildCat]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Well if you know the format steam uses it doesn't take more than 10 seconds to remember.

Steam has more than 75 million users worldwide. This request is not just for me, but would benefit all users, regardless of where they live. If free software designers can accomodate international date formats, then a company like Steam, making millions in profit a year, certainly can afford to update their client with a few lines of relevant code. Doesn't take much effort to be more professional.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by WildCat:

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Well if you know the format steam uses it doesn't take more than 10 seconds to remember.

Steam has more than 75 million users worldwide. This request is not just for me, but would benefit all users, regardless of where they live. If free software designers can accomodate international date formats, then a company like Steam, making millions in profit a year, certainly can afford to update their client with a few lines of relevant code. Doesn't take much effort to be more professional.

Hmm now that I think about it... it may actually cause as many issues as it solves. Remember unlike most software Steam can be accessed from multiple computers. heck you just need to login. If the date format keeps jumping based on the settings of the PC running it you may find yourself making an assumption of the date and time based around what you're used to.

Perhaps having on fixed format for everyone means that alothough a fair chunk have to remember it's a different date format everyone aeverywhere will be seeing the same date format, no matter what computer they're logged in from.


Sorry just playing devil's advocate.

[wuddih]

Originally posted by WildCat:

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Well if you know the format steam uses it doesn't take more than 10 seconds to remember.

Steam has more than 75 million users worldwide. This request is not just for me, but would benefit all users, regardless of where they live. If free software designers can accomodate international date formats, then a company like Steam, making millions in profit a year, certainly can afford to update their client with a few lines of relevant code. Doesn't take much effort to be more professional.

steam has more then 120 million active users and over 200 million registered accounts. and this request should be primarily for you.

I have "m.d.yyyy( hh:mm:ss)" or "d mmm(, yyyy)" everywhere I need it.

UK is mostly mm/dd/yyyy. look at your sub ticket or any receipt and that is why it is displayed that way to you on steam also.

[Gus the Crocodile]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Remember unlike most software Steam can be accessed from multiple computers.

It can, but for an individual user, all of those computers are very likely to be in the same country, so even if the date format was being adjusted automatically, there's no reason to expect the format would "keep jumping".

Those few users who do jump from country to country will be used to dealing what that kind of change anyway. But you could nonetheless let people override the default for their account.

Edit: having said all that, I just checked a few coupons sitting in my inventory (given that's the sort of example the OP gave), and the expiry dates are correctly listed in DD/MM/YYYY format as is normal here in Australia. So...they're already doing this? Wonder why it isn't adjusted for the OP.

[wuddih]

Originally posted by Gus the Crocodile:

Edit: having said all that, I just checked a few coupons sitting in my inventory (given that's the sort of example the OP gave), and the expiry dates are correctly listed in DD/MM/YYYY format as is normal here in Australia. So...they're already doing this? Wonder why it isn't adjusted for the OP.

yes there are already doing this and as explained in my previous post mm/dd/yyyy is very wide-spread and the traditional standard in UK. the mdy standard is just 10 years old, that is like yesterday. the emails from the bank of scotland are all mm/dd/yy and am/pm clock, as an example.

[WildCat]

Originally posted by wuddih:

UK is mostly mm/dd/yyyy. look at your sub ticket or any receipt and that is why it is displayed that way to you on steam also.

No.. UK is and has always been DD/MM/YYYY. We do not use the American month-before-day system, and no our receipts do not print it MM/DD/YYYY either. Companies in this country use day-month-year also, there are no double standards. Sub tickets, and all printed train tickets in general do not even use a fully numerical system, they're printed with abbreviated months, i.e 23 APR 15 – so you have that wrong also.

Bank of Scotland is not likey to use American dates either. It's more likely that your emails are using your system settings. British banks aren't going to risk confusing customers by using foreign standards. That not only wouldn't make sense, it would be against the Banking Code. All printed material must be clear and understandable, and using foreign methods would fail that and result in the bank being fined.

I don't know where in Britain you claim to have been, but you don't have a clue about us or our "traditional standards" given the number of mistakes you have made. Whereas I am British and have lived here all of my life, which exceeds 35 years. I don't need correcting with false information, thank you.

[WildCat]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Originally posted by WildCat:

Steam has more than 75 million users worldwide. This request is not just for me, but would benefit all users, regardless of where they live. If free software designers can accomodate international date formats, then a company like Steam, making millions in profit a year, certainly can afford to update their client with a few lines of relevant code. Doesn't take much effort to be more professional.

Hmm now that I think about it... it may actually cause as many issues as it solves. Remember unlike most software Steam can be accessed from multiple computers. heck you just need to login. If the date format keeps jumping based on the settings of the PC running it you may find yourself making an assumption of the date and time based around what you're used to.

Perhaps having on fixed format for everyone means that alothough a fair chunk have to remember it's a different date format everyone aeverywhere will be seeing the same date format, no matter what computer they're logged in from.


Sorry just playing devil's advocate.

I have a PC, a laptop, a tablet and a smartphone. They all display the date in the UK format. Pray tell, why would I have one of them set up differently from the rest?

Also, it doesn't necessarily have to come from the OS, an option in the user settings would suffice. Most countries have a regional preference which could be fixed based on location, but Steam could offer choices.. I know the Wikipedia interface allows users to choose their favourite date format.

[The End]

Originally posted by wuddih:

mm/dd/yyyy is very wide-spread and the traditional standard in UK.

That is as wrong as it can be, most of Europa use DD/MM/YY, that includes GB/UK too.

Here is a good link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

Steamclient/hompage should have an option to choose the format used in the customers country, there is no reason to not have it.

[WildCat]

Originally posted by Rockon:

Here is a good link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

Funny! The DMY population outnumbers the MDY population by more than 10x – one country uses MDY most compared to dozens that don't, and yet Steam uses that one. I think that certainly reinforces my point. Steam really needs to buck its ideas up...

[The End]

@WildCat
I took a look at one of my receipts and the format is "Fri Mar 13 22:39:14 2015", same format is used in Steamforums, and my client is set to English.

Is it only in tradeing you have USFormat?

[WildCat]

I'm not on about receipts, as I stated in my OP. Look for an item less than a week old in yout Inventory and on the right it states something like: "Tradable & Marketable After: 4/12/2015 08:00:00" in orange text. I haven't looked everywhere for examples of U.S. formats.. I simply noted that it is used for this tradable message and might be used elsewhere. It could be that some sloppy programmer has simply coded this message to display a date without accounting for non-U.S. users and that it leads to confusion as that reads as 4 December 2015 to me.