Please use real dates and times everywhere - down with fuzzy dates
complete
E
Eric Morin
A while back I created this feedback (https://feedback.huntress.com/feature-requests/p/use-real-dates-on-incidents-list-page-and-detail-pages) that was addressed and has made me very happy. Now I've run into more places where you folks use fuzzy dates and times, and I must ask again for them to be removed from your UI and your style guide. For clarity, a fuzzy date is when you say "About two months ago."
The utility of this has always puzzled me. You would never describe an ip address as 'About 192.168.0.' so please don't do it with dates and times.
Patrick Sofo [Security Product Manager]
complete
Absolute timestamps are now shown alongside relative timestamps in the Portal
Patrick Sofo [Security Product Manager]
Hi can you share some of the locations where relative timestamps are still used where you would like them to be exact timestamps?
E
Eric Morin
Patrick Sofo [Security Product Manager]: Well, everywhere they are used. ;) I know that's not very helpful, but I am certain I wouldn't be able to find them all even if I tried. Here's one, though, that was reached by going to https://stencon.huntress.io/org/<redacted>/agents/<redacted>
Patrick Sofo [Security Product Manager]
Eric Morin: Thanks Eric! I will see what we can do in some of these other locations to be more specific. There are benefits to quickly seeing a rough time estimate when doing analysis but i totally understand the desire to see specific times.
E
Eric Morin
Patrick Sofo [Security Product Manager]: Hi Patrick - I have never found such a fuzzy date helpful - if it's 2023 and I see the year is 2021 I know it's about two years ago. Also, the farther out you go, the less precise you are - when you get to a year, your variance range is now 12 months.
But if some people really do like fuzzy dates, a solution might be to return both, eg:
2021-05-17 (about 2 years ago)
or
2021-05-17
(about 2 years ago)
or have a toggle to switch between them. Obviously that's a lot of complexity and primarily adds testing challenges with low utility, so if I were PM I'd nix that last one. Thanks for your attention! It is a great feature of the Huntress team!
J
Joe Cimino
Patrick Sofo [Security Product Manager]: I couldn't disagree more. We (IT Professionals) deal with data. Estimations can be calculated from data but we need data. Fuzzy dates are 'dumbed down' data. When you look at the details in escalation events and their level of complexity then compare it to these fuzzy dates, it's nonsensical. If anything, make the Escalations 'fuzzy' and tell us what needs to be done...
C
Chris Thomas
I completely agree. "Fuzzy dates" are useless anywhere I see them, outside of maybe my email client. Anyone needing to actually document, analyze, and describe what happened from a log file doesn't want to go through even MORE work remembering to document the time they ran a report and extrapolating dates / times.