Inconsistent date formatting on Fab - show some love to non-US users

I am logged into Fab in English, but am not in the US. Most of the dates are written in a way that is unambiguous, e.g. “Publish date September 18, 2024”.

However, the date format used for the time-limited freebies is ambiguous and inconsistent with the formatting of other dates. It uses the US date format that is not internationally recognised and thus prone to confusion. For example, the current text, “Limited-Time Free (Until 2/11 9:59 AM ET)” would mean “until 2 November” in many countries, including the one I live in and most other English-speaking countries. At least by writing out the month (e.g. February 11, 2024, as used in other dates on Fab), this ambiguity is resolved.

It would be great if you could be consistent in the use of date formats, ensure that they are not ambiguous, and, ideally, use the local date format tied to the country of the account (or make this a configurable option). For example, my account is in Austria, where the standard date format is DD.MM.YY, as is the case in much of the world.

It would also be great if times could include the UTC time, to avoid forcing international users to have to Google ET to figure out what this means for them. Most people know their time zone relative to UTC, but nobody knows all the time zones in the world by heart.

That’s good feedback - thank you, @steevmsteevm . I’ve shared it with the team.

1 Like

I’d like to +1 this, dates and times in an international storefront should always localise to the system/browser locale client-side, or use an internationally un-ambiguous format like YYYY/MM/DD.

If they cannot be localised client-side for whatever reason (eg. embedded in an image) then please either put them in UTC±0 or list the UTC offset next to the stated time zone (eg. “ET (UTC-16)”). Having to open worldtimebuddy to manually localise a timestamp gets frustrating pretty quickly.

I’ve made bad purchasing decisions in EGS and other Epic services in the past due to this, thinking a date like 12/02 means 5 days from now, as opposed to 10 months from now. I’m sure I’m not the only international customer who has made the reasonable assumption that dates/times have been localised to the system/browser locale.

2 Likes