How to change the display format of timetags associated with comments or attachments?

Question

The display formats ("1-minute ago" or "yesterday" or "last week") are way too imprecise to be useful.

What happens when one tries to correlate a comment or attachment with an external event and all he has as a reference is "Last Month" or "More than 3 months ago"?

I would like to replace this representation by an IS representation like YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss that would be more precise and useful.

Please steer away from the 99-99-99 representation used in many countries as it can be anything. Is it YY-MM-DD or DD-MM-YY or MM-DD-YY? No one knows. That's why the IS representation is so useful.

Thanks.

Francois Fournier_jdbf2c · Answer

Thank you Nic for your reply.

Unfortunately and I should have mentioned it firsthand, I'm using a Web-based Jira that's maintained at the corporate level.

I wondered if, as a Web client, there was any way I could control the way dates are displayed on my PC.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The practical bit:  Edit <jira home>/jira-config.properties (you may need to create it - it's not there by default.  It's plain text) and add a line "jira.lf.date.relativize=false" to it.  Restart Jira, you'll see all dates and times are now date based.

I'm with you on the shortening of dates, it's just wrong.  I'm relaxed on the exact use of the ISO standard, but it should always include the year as four digits, and be ordered by significance - the American "standard" is wrong and should be made illegal when dates are numeric.

Once you've turned of the (what I prefer to call "fuzzy, imprecise and unhelpful" over "friendly") dates, then you can adjust the date/time displays in "look and feel" - annoyingly, you have to do it four times, but at least we can set the years to 4 digits and set the dmy order to something useful