option for datetime display format

[Elypha]

Hi!

Can we have an option to display the datetime of gamebanana download candidates in an explicit way, e.g., show something like 2024-11-30 11:29 instead of 1y for each of them in the snapshot. Uploaders may not always label each file clearly.

A (personal) tentative idea is a checkbox like Use custom datetime format for gamebanana downloads followed by an input field to specify the format, with the default value being something like yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm zzz.

What do you think?

PS I was wondering if you'd like to give more flexibility for power users, i.e., advanced settings, to control things like this in IMM, for instance (I may be mistaken),

• Changing the width of elements/columns, like the width of the right side panel, and the column for variable names of the Hotkeys table since they can easily get longer than the key configured.
• Using wrapped text (multi-line) for mod names/titles.

Since migrating between mod managers is quite a pain and IMM is under very active development, I'll appreciate it a lot if you'd like to share your plan on this. Thanks!

[jpbhatt21]

Hi @Elypha , that's a great idea, how about I add a tool tip to it so that it will show the exact datetime of the upload, similar to how it is on gb?

Regarding more flexibility for power users, I'll look into it, but the two points you mentioned are totally understandable. I will probably be reworking the right sidebar for local mode in the upcoming versions so I'll see what I can do!

For future plans in general, I usually add wip updates over at the discord server, along with user bug reports/feature reqs/test builds, so feel free to check it out.

[Elypha]

Thanks for sharing the details! I'll definitely check out the information and updates on Discord.

I'm aware that gamebanana already provides an exact datetime via a hover tooltip, and from a purely informational standpoint that does work. However, based on my own usage experience, I feel it's somewhat limited functionally.

In most cases where users care about upload time, it's usually because they need to compare across multiple files: to quickly identify which one is the latest, or to recognise which files likely belong to the same update batch. For example, I've encountered mods that have three separate variants, uploaded individually. If the author updates them once, you end up with 6 files in total (2 updates × 3 variants). If it's a partial update, the case can be worse, like a situation of 3+1=4 files. In scenarios like this, relative timestamps or hover-only tooltips make comparison unnecessarily slow and error-prone.

Because of that, I personally find the current GB approach a bit suboptimal. Displaying dates directly in the UI using standard numeric formats (explicit month/day and 24-hour time) provides a much more consistent cognitive experience, especially for quick visual scanning and comparison, without requiring hover actions.

I'm also aware that users from Asian regions are generally accustomed to the 24-hour clock, while some of my friends in the states have told me they're quite unfamiliar with it. That's why my tentative compromise idea was to let users specify their own format via a standard pattern string such as yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm, and optionally document a few common presets in a wiki or FAQ for those who want guidance.

I don't have any intention of pushing this as a requirement - I just wanted to share my perspective and experience in case it's useful as a reference. Thanks again for being open to feedback and discussion.

[jpbhatt21]

Got it, I'll prob just add datetime modes in settings to switch between datetime diff and just datetime. Just curious but how often do you interact with old mods online? Cause ig most users would just use recent mod (as old ones are usually broken by default)

[Elypha]

Thanks for the clarification!

For me, this mainly comes up whenever I pull an older character that I really like from a rerun banner (which is pretty much the norm for the gacha games). When that happens, I usually go through all available mods to see what options exist.

In practice, a single character often has less than 100 mods. Skimming through the thumbnails and filtering by personal taste only takes a few minutes, and sorting by likes (descending) makes it even faster. I'm not sure if all users are as opinionated or picky as I am, but personally I almost always try to find the mods that best match my aesthetic preferences, rather than just settling for the most recent ones, let alone some less popular characters don't even have recent mods at all. If someone even needs a manager to manage their mods they may very well browse a lot I think.

Because of that, I do end up interacting with mods that were uploaded months/years ago. That said, in many cases these older mods can now be fixed automatically via scripts. A typical example would be the WuWa fixer: https://github.com/Moonholder/Wuwa_Mod_Fixer which can automatically repair historical mods even from multiple patches behind. So from my experience, broken old mods has become less of a blocker than it used to be (thus upload time still remains a useful signal).

[jpbhatt21]

Ah, makes sense.