Notifications times missing hover text and timezone info

The "Notifications" panel, which can be opened using the envelope icon near the top right of the window to the left of the user avatar, shows the time of posting of each message in human readable form, such as "4 hours ago". The link "See all your notifications" goes to the "Your Inbox" page, which shows the time of posting of each message in more detail, such as "Jul 2, 2025 at 02:39":

Unlike other parts of the interface, hovering over "4 hours ago" in the "Notifications" panel does not show the full date and time.

In the "Your Inbox" page, the more detailed date and time does not show in the standardised format available on hover elsewhere in the interface (such as under posts and comments) such as "2025-07-02T02:39:58Z". This makes it inconsistent, and more importantly makes it unclear that this is a UTC time (indicated by the "Z" in the hover text in other parts of the interface") rather than a local time. Without comparing with the "4 hours ago" from the "Notifications" panel, it would not be obvious that the times on the "Your Inbox" page are not local.

At some point it would be good to have times more clearly labelled as UTC or local. Even where this is already indicated in the places with hover text, I suspect that many users are unaware that the trailing "Z" indicates the UTC timezone.

I'd also find it useful to be able to see the full date and time in the "Notifications" panel rather than having to follow the "See all your notifications" link and then scroll through to find the relevant message. Maybe this could be added at the same point that hover text is replaced with a method more compatible with touchscreen users? I mention this here because it would be easy to overlook this case that does not currently have hover text, when adjusting the places that do.

posted 8 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

8h ago by Monica Cellio‭

trichoplax‭

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