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Flow: Timestamps for new posts, often show "negative seconds ago", at first
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Description

screenshot

When I hit reply on a new post, I often see a negative time for when I posted it, which steadily ticks down to zero, and then starts counting upwards normally. (See screenshot.) I've seen it as high as "-24 seconds ago".

  1. negative time is badly confusing, and should be displayed to the user. Perhaps "in the last few seconds", or "very recently", or "within the last minute".
  1. it might be good to also understand what is causing this issue in the first place

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal

Attached:

Screenshot_from_2014-07-16_23:08:57.png (1×1 px, 202 KB)

See also:

Details

Reference
bz68136

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.Nov 22 2014, 3:38 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz68136.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).
  1. it might be good to also understand what is causing this issue in the

first place

I think that the time difference displayed is calculated based on the browser/pc clock, which was/is/can be a bit off compared to the server one (providing the timestamp).
I just had that too, and based on a atom clock website, my clock is currently 25 seconds in the past, which would match, what I saw on my flow post.

matthiasmullie subscribed.

We've made some changes to this timestamp since this bug was posted, but this report is still valid - I just tested.

With a slow clock, I got "in a few seconds" instead of "a few seconds ago".

Quiddity added subscribers: TomerA, IKhitron, Amire80, Aklapper.

From merged task, Amire80 wrote:

A Hebrew Wikipedia user wrote to me that after he posted he saw a human timestamp that says "in a minute" - in the future. I haven't seem it myself yet, but it does sound like something that could come from moment.js. Future timestamps are definitely wrong :)

and

OK, I reproduced it: This happens if the machine's local time is earlier than the server time. Not all computer clocks are in sync. It would be nice to have all visible timestamps be synchronized with server time.

I'm new here, so sorry for disturbing.
I've experienced the problem reported earlier.
In my opinion, trying to synchonize PC or to play with several clocks is a hard job. Maybe all the timestamps should be computed and converted to text server-side. Otherwise there's always a dependency on client's clock, which looks like a bad idea. As a proof : this bug exists and we are having a discussion about this problem.
My intuition is that a simple solution like an offset can lead to wrong information.
Sorry not to be more helpful.