How Can I Make Malwarebytes Date Display to My Regional Settings?

[Chris4877]

Hello, and greetings from Australia!

System Information:

• Malwarebytes 3.0 Premium Version: 3.6.1.2711 Component Package Version: 1.0.482 Update Package Version: 1.0.7873
• Windows 7 Ultimate x 64 SP1

I am just wondering why Malwarebytes 3.0 Premium displays dates and times in the U.S. standard format, (MM/DD/YY H:MM AM/PM), even though my Windows Region and Language Settings are set to display dates and times in ISO 8601 format, (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM[:SS]).  This anomaly is most readily apparent when perusing history and sorting log files by ascending (or descending) date and time.

I quite understand that my Region and Language Settings are not the local standard for my country, (Australia), (DD/MM/YY H:MM AM/PM), but all my other installed programs, (including MS Office), respect my customised regional settings, and I don't understand why Malwarebytes does not. 

I cannot seem to find any item in the settings that would allow me to change this behaviour, and I'm wondering if anyone here has any suggestions as to how I might be able to change it.

I realise this is a relatively trivial problem compared with most of the problems posted in this forum, but if anyone here might be kind enough to offer any suggestions as to how I might fix this, I would appreciate it very much.  I was thinking that, rather than raise a support ticket, (which would be private, and therefore unshareable), it would be better to post a public question about the problem in this forum, so that any advice or suggestions offered here might help anyone else who may have noticed this phenomenon.

FYI, I have attached 3 screenshots, showing my About Screen, my Dashboard Screen and my Reports Screen.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best regards to all
Christopher (Chris) Souter
(Sydney, Australia)

[Malwarebytes]

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[exile360]

Greetings,

You should be able to accomplish this by opening Malwarebytes and going to Settings>Application and using the drop-down menu under the Display Language section, select English (U.K.) as your language and this should convert the date/time format to the European standard, which I believe should be the same or at least similar to the standard/format used in Australia.

I hope this helps, and please let us know if there is anything else we might assist you with.

Thanks

[Chris4877]

Hi exile360,

Many thanks for your quick reply, and for the help contained therein!

That was the one menu item that I had not noticed, and yes, the date is now displaying as DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM (24-hr), which is pretty close to what we use in Australia. (IIRC, our railway platform indicators display train arrival times in 24-hour format, but general usage in Australia is 12-hour AM/PM format).
At least I'm not getting confused by dates any more, but I wish there could be an ISO8601date/time display setting, (but I realise that the display language setting would then need a bit more granularity).

Best regards to all,
Christopher (Chris) Souter
(Sydney, Australia)

[exile360]

Excellent, I'm glad to be of service

Thanks for the additional info regarding your region's standard time and date format.  I will advise the Product team and request they add such an option for the sake of the regions, like Australia, that use that format.  No guarantees obviously, but if they are willing, it should be possible (and likely quite trivial given the fact that most coding languages have excellent support for such formats and standards these days, including QT I'm sure, which is what Malwarebytes uses for their UI code).

[Chris4877]

5 minutes ago, exile360 said:

Thanks for the additional info regarding your region's standard time and date format.  I will advise the Product team and request they add such an option for the sake of the regions, like Australia, that use that format.

That's very good to hear!

In that case, you may find this Wikipedia useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Australia

It's about 95% correct but I can't edit the actual page, or someone would call me out for original research, which is a Wikipedia "no-no!"

I don't think that the use of ISO 8601 is as widespread as the page would suggest, and I've never seen a government publication with an ISO 8601 date.

[exile360]

Cool, thanks

In my feature request I just requested that they implement an option for it to display the same DD/MM/YYYY format as the U.K., but display the time in the 12 hour AM/PM format rather than the 24 hour format for the sake of regions that use it.  I'm honestly not even certain the U.K. themselves use the 24 hour time format in informal documents and publications because I find it hard to imagine anyone outside the military using a 24 hour clock in normal conversation/writing.  I think it just may be the common practice for software there, and that's likely why Malwarebytes implemented it the way they did.

[AdvancedSetup]

Even ISO 8601 leaves too much room for ambiguity or burden on the user to know or understand offset times. It came out in 1988 which as you know is an eternity for the computer world and it's still not even close to a standard 30 years later.

Not that it will fix the issue but I wish at least a baby step of using YYYY-MM-DD would become a World-wide standard for all computing. But I won't hold my breath waiting for that either ?

 

[exile360]

I can see how that date format would be preferable programmatically, but I'd hate for PC/software UIs to use such a date standard just because of the way I read and process such information.

[AdvancedSetup]

Hahaha - I've been processing it that way now for at least a decade so not using that format is odd to me. DD--MM-YYYY does not sort by date correctly, MM-DD-YYYY does not sort by date correctly. Only YYYY-MM-DD sorts correctly.

 

[TempLost]

1 hour ago, exile360 said:

Cool, thanks

In my feature request I just requested that they implement an option for it to display the same DD/MM/YYYY format as the U.K., but display the time in the 12 hour AM/PM format rather than the 24 hour format for the sake of regions that use it.  I'm honestly not even certain the U.K. themselves use the 24 hour time format in informal documents and publications because I find it hard to imagine anyone outside the military using a 24 hour clock in normal conversation/writing.  I think it just may be the common practice for software there, and that's likely why Malwarebytes implemented it the way they did.

Yes, I think you're right. As a Brit living in France, I use the 24 hour clock now and have used the YYYY-MM-DD format for years computer work to ensure easy file sorting. The UK, as in all things (eg Brexit!), wants to go its own way and mostly doesn't use the 24 hour clock day-to-day but still prefers am/pm.

[Chris4877]

2 hours ago, exile360 said:

In my feature request I just requested that they implement an option for it to display the same DD/MM/YYYY format as the U.K

Well, it would be nice to see an option for ISO 8601, too: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM[:SS] because, (IMHO), that is the best way to sort dates/times.

[exile360]

35 minutes ago, Chris4877 said:

Well, it would be nice to see an option for ISO 8601, too: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM[:SS] because, (IMHO), that is the best way to sort dates/times.

I suspect that it likely does on a code level, under the hood, though I don't know for certain, but they probably wouldn't expose that format to the user/customer since it's used more often for machines/software than it is for documents and interfaces designed for human interaction, at least that's my take on it.