New! Competition end dates posting

angelflower_2 · 10 November 2012 at 2:06PM

I would prefer not to have the new field displayed as an extra line but advocate ensuring that it forms part of the title. The only function of this extra field is if we can use it to search.

I have found the search function completely unreliable in the last few weeks. I just did a search for end date of 12/11 in titles only, and received so many irrelevant returns that it is making it very difficult to enter comps by end date now. Please could you fix this?

bargainhuntergal · 10 November 2012 at 2:24PM

I'm a bit confused as I'm not really understanding why people are searching for end dates rather than sorting the forum into end date order?

(By end date order I mean thread title ascending order)

I see no advantage to searching but every advantage to sorting. Searching will only ever (with the current setup) bring up 300 results, or 12 pages and there's very often more pages than this anyway, let alone at the end of the month where I've seen anything up to around 100 pages (with an average of something like 60-70 pages every month end).

Searching has always brought up strange results for me too, where as sorting never does.

The only things you have to be careful with when sorting are that if it's a 1st, 2nd or 3rd of a month you're doing you'd need to check the end of the dates for example you'd check upto the end of the 01's in case the date has been put as 01/1 01/2, 01/3 etc and also where 10th, 20th and 30th begins just in case someone has put for example E: 1/12, E: 2/12, E: 3/12 and the first and last couple of pages for any where the end date has been put in the wrong format, or not been given at all.

I have a feeling it's that some are searching for end dates rather than sorting that's causing most of the problems and the reason that this feature was requested in the first place?

tgroom57 · 10 November 2012 at 2:31PM

2 things:
Easy to tack the end date permanently to the front of the title using the concatenate function. Surprised the 'resource' didn't do this, it was what I expected.

Two, searching for a date string i.e. using
E: 10/11
or any version thereof including in quotes "E: 10/11"
does not work because the search function on MSE strips out any non-alphanumeric characters and just searches for the numbers, in this case 10 or 11 or both. If this can be addressed all your problems will be solved.

In the meantime, sorting by thread title is your best option.

amsquared · 10 November 2012 at 8:51PM

Having worked with file naming conventions for years to enable ease of sorting it is usual to create the date in the following order 2012/11/10 and not in the usual 10/11/2012. If the sort function is a pure alpha/numeric ascending/descending sort and you don't put the year first you will end up with a mix of 2012 and 2013 posts all lumped together.

For example 02/12/2012 and 01/12/2013 will sort in the wrong order ie 01/12/2013 before 02/12/2012. If you put the year first the alpha/numeric sort is correct.

Has this been tested?

Admittedly it is rare to have a large number of comps that have end dates over a year in length.

asleep · 11 November 2012 at 11:55AM

As described above, if a change is going to be made to the end date, please make it ISO 8601 compliant! It would make your life a lot easier!

E: 10/11 is inherently unsortable, as it would come between 10/12 and 10/09, but 11/11 would be above 10/12! With ISO 8601 dates are expressed as YY (orYYYY) MM DD.

So when sorting, you would just use the normal alphanumeric search (already built in) and you could find whatever date you wanted quite quickly.

Even better, if something finishes at 17:30, no problem, ISO 8601 can be used to show time as accurately as you like.

I am typing this at 2012-11-11 10:44:52 (or 20121111 104452 if you prefer). By using the internationally adopted format you don't get confusion with Americans and their backwards date format. You can search by day, hour, minute. You could then easily code in extra functionality. If someone wants to see the date in the current format no problem, you have a standardised date format so you can display it in any format the user wants.

Other benefits include not allowing a user to set an end date in the past, auto-expiring competitions, easily having an "ending today" listing which could even be in expiry order, giving the user a chance to enter that comp ending in 5 minutes before they start on any others!

Tylium · 12 November 2012 at 1:13PM

My suggestion for dates is YYYY/MM/DD, or just YY/MM/DD. This would make sorting more efficient.

Say you have these posts.

E: 12/12/01 - Win a dog
E: 13/01/12 - Win a cat
E: 12/11/10 - Win a years supply of Trill Budgie food
E: 12/11/11 - Win a years supply of dog food

Sort by Ascending would produce:

E: 12/11/10 - Win a years supply of Trill Budgie food
E: 12/11/11 - Win a years supply of dog food
E: 12/12/01 - Win a dog
E: 13/01/12 - Win a cat

At the moment with the day first, you just get all the competitions on the 1st of every month, then the 2nd and so on.

Edit: Looks like this has been suggested before. Sorry.

hamster · 12 November 2012 at 4:36PM

This has been discussed in the past and unfortunately most of the comps are posted and entered by real people so the idea of forcing a standard on them which is counter-intuitive and designed to make things easier for computers and programmers was felt to be totally inappropriate.

While ISO 8601 is an excellent solution for international data exchange and for internal computer use there are very few programmers who would see it as appropriate for a user interface.

For example, having entered 1000s of comps I have never once come across one that required date of birth to be entered in ISO 8601 format because user interfaces are designed to be used by ordinary people who use the local, well established, time/date conventions.

Back on the original topic, the new end date field is inconvenient, inflexible and pointless.

It slows down posting, requiring posters to enter end dates twice in two different formats, for no good reason.

It adds no new information to the posts and since nothing can be done with the field (like searching, editing or sorting) it just takes up space for nothing.

A editable, searchable, sortable field that replaces the E: dd/mm format would be useful.

Forcing posters to enter the end date twice for no apparent reason is not.

Elsbells21 · 12 November 2012 at 6:16PM

Not massively keen on this, but thanks to the MSE mods for going to all the effort.

Have not read every tab, but is there a way to search via this new end. (I know how to do it for the E: xx/xx)

Ta muchly!

Glad · 12 November 2012 at 8:21PM

I've asked MSE Joe to have a read through this thread

comping_cat · 14 November 2012 at 5:02PM

Just looked down the first page and there are 2 comps, that have put the new end date, but have missed out the standard (and searchable) E: XX/XX.

Yesterday i posted a comp, and then went to do something. When i got back, because i had forgotton the new end date, it hadnt posted.

I think its great that MSE are trying to help, but unfortunately, i dont think what they have done is helpful.

If someone from MSE does read this - around the time this new end date thing was implimented, for about an hour the 'spam' button had moved a few millimeters to the left, making a very small gap between the spam and tick buttons. This was brilliant, but then it went back to normal, and im back to hitting the spam button in error again

New! Competition end dates posting

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