Is there a required date format on TVTropes?

I've only seen instances of dates formatted as "month day, year" on TVTropes. Is this format required or can others be used?

Edited by mincerafter42 on Feb 14th 2022 at 3:05:40 AM

We don't have a standard date format, although you'd need a good reason to use more than one format in a single paragraph/example. I prefer "day month year" or "year month day", myself. The whole reason for the comma in "month day comma year" is that the sequence is out-of-order.

Also, it's a good idea to write the month out in full. This is because numerical dates are read as DD/MM/YYYY in British English and MM/DD/YYYY in American English; I don't know about other English-speaking countries. For example, if someone wrote 1/2/2022, this would look like 1 February 2022 to a British person, but an American would read it as January 2 2022. However, if you include the name of the month, there's no risk of anyone misreading the date.

Edited by Clare on Feb 18th 2022 at 3:32:16 PM

Thanks! And yeah, I agree writing out the month name is useful to prevent ambiguity in month formats that aren't YYYY-MM-DD

Conventionally, I'd go for the time format of the country of origin. If it's an American work, I operate on "Month Day, Year", otherwise "Day Month Year".

Edited by GrafVonTirol on Mar 28th 2023 at 10:18:20 AM

I'd also suggest a "first come, first served" policy, like we have with American and Commonwealth Spellings. This would mean if a date was formatted as, say, 1 January 2022, it would have to keep that formatting and not be "corrected" to January 1 2022. Or vice versa.

As long as it's clear what the actual date is, the format doesn't matter. We would not accept "1/12/21", for example, but we would accept "Jan 12, 2021" or "1 December, 2021".