Website & Forums Api: Express Times In Unix Timestamp

If you're not developing anything around the API then this is probably unrelated to you. But I still want to mention that here because I develop stuff around wynn's API :D

So here are a few reasons that why the API should express times in unix timestamps instead of nicely formatted strings such as "2018-11-02 13:50:22"

Reason 1: Confusing timezones.
I actually have to dig around a bit to find out that the time strings are formatted as in GMT-4, and it changed to GMT-5 earlier today, causing confusion. Having to hardcode it's timezone is also a bad practice.

Reason 2: Unnecessary work for us developers.
As we know, almost every language comes with libraries that formats a unix timestamp into neat strings, so we can display them properly to our end users. But with a formatted string, we actually have to parse that string and convert it to a timestamp in order to store the correct time (I don't want everything in my database to be 12/13 hours off and so does the others). That's extra work for us.

The solution is really simple: whenever an API response contains a time, such as last join, also put in a timestamp. Like the field "last_join" should be accompanied by another field "last_join_ts". This maintains backward compatibility.

 

I do agree, it’d be so much easier to manage timezones when I’m working with the api.+1

 

Colin likes this

 

Doesn't the `request` parameter contain a timestamp or is it a date? Nonetheless a good idea, +1

 

There are still some parameters that are nicely formatted like territory acquired time and first/last join times