Another new feature / description of a current feature: Relative / Absolute Timestamps.

You may have noticed in each thread's list of replies that there is a value at the end, something to the tune of "+1H" or "+2W" or "+1M". These represent things like "+1 hour", "+2 weeks", or "+1 Month" respectively. Their intent is to show you, approximately, how old a post is, or, how old it is in relation to what it is in reply to.

Let me explain. Humans, when it comes down to it, aren't good at measuring time. We have things like years, months, weeks, days, hours, seconds, and other fun arbitrary allotments of time to represent an otherwise single-dimension value. Computers measure the passing of time as a number of seconds, which is easier, but hard to qualify for humans.

Every other forum I've seen displays dates like "2010-09-27 20:55:04 -0900" that tells you everything you have to know about the date. However, most people when they're considering a post, only care about how recent it is, and have to spend extra time remembering if that date is now, then, in the past, in the future, last week, etc. This is why I decided to only display the full date on the post you're interested in, and display a short "relative time" that's of the most immediate interest.

Unfortunately, I got all programmer on you. I figured out that there are two types of "relative time" I can show you. I can calculate the amount of time that has passed since a post occurred and the current time (what I'll call "absolute time"). What I can also calculate is the time between when the parent of a post was posted, and when its reply was posted (what I'll call "relative time"). I chose the latter as the default, and failed to explain what I was doing.

Absolute time is the most interesting when you're trying to get a general idea of a timeline. Relative time is useful when you're trying to figure out the timeline of a particular thread. Absolute time is simpler to calculate (I only need the creation timestamp of the post and the current timestamp). In calculating absolute time, all posts are dislaying their approximate age.

Relative time is a little more complicated: the first post in the thread (the "root") is calculated using absolute time, and all subsequent posts are calculated relative to that of its parent. That means if the root is "+3W", the initial post is three weeks old. If a following reply to the root is "+1H", that means someone replied to the root within one hour, but three weeks ago.

I can see people preferring either. I've now put up another user preference that lets you choose how you want to view your time differences. You can choose between absolute time and relative time.