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Is this still an issue?

Why would anyone use a date lozenge if you can't change the formatting.

This defect causes us waste and rework, trying to standardize our date and time formats. It is creating inconsistent date formatting in customer-facing work products, making it look like we don't know what we are doing, along the lines of "if you can't get a date field correct, why would we expect you to get anything else correct?"

Our company is the same boat, and would like to see these configuration options as well. 

My company would also like this feature to be implemented for both display and sorting purposes.  (just to keep this going into 2020)

This feature request was created in 2014 and its still not implemented. It is such a basic feature. Very disappointed. 

My team would benefit from having a date lozenge that sorts. In a table, the dd-mm-yyy format does not sort properly, unless the date is the only thing within the cell. If there is any plain text in the cell following the date, confluence is not able to sort the date lozenge correctly. This has caused some frustration in structuring our page properties reports. Of course, this wouldn't be an issue if we were allowed to choose our own lozenge format and use YYYY/MM/DD. It's very frustrating that this format is tied to the language selection. Why isn't it an option for admins to choose?

Just to add my two cents – there needs to be more configuration flexibility with dates in general. Not only does the date lozenge not respect the date setting, but there are no ways to specify alternative formats (long vs. short dates, for example). Also, having the first day of the week default to Monday is very confusing to my users (primarily US), most of whom expect the first day of the week to be listed as Sunday. 

All of this should be configurable – if not in a nice single place, at least in the same manner as JIRA (which provides plenty of configuration, but isn't exactly user friendly when trying to get things set up).

Not that it matters, but while I personally prefer the ISO 8601 format, many of my users would be confused (or at least annoyed) by it as well. They're pretty stuck on the m/d/yyyy format...

Needs to use ISO 8601 by default (thank you Mark A. Ziesemer for the XKCD reference too). It should also be configurable. However, ISO 8601 would make table sorting MUCH easier!

2 concerns:

1. Regardless of the date format configured or entered, dates need to sort properly.
2. I have both the "Formatting and International Settings" in the Confluence administration, as well as my workspace regional settings (Windows 10) set to ISO 8601 format (yyyy-MM-dd). As @Sylvain noted, the Date Lozenge still displays it the way it wants: dd-MM-yyyy. (Tested with all of Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox. Confluence 5.9.1)

So sorry, @George - while using a built-in OS function here from an individual's workstation setting would be ideal, it currently isn't applying, and a fix for this is urgently required.

I recently entered a new large organization, and am hoping to introduce Confluence here after having used it for several years previously with much success - but trivial issues like this that have already been open for over a year and will probably remain unresolved for another few years are very discouraging, and will become a factor (along with several other similar types of issues) during our evaluation.

If a non-configurable date format is going to be used here, at least make it a standard that can and will work for all of the needs here (including sorting). Even as an American, I agree that MM-dd-yyyy is not logical. dd-MM-yyyy is better, but backwards - and still wouldn't resolve a lexicographical sorting example.

(http://xkcd.com/1179/)

There are a number of advantages to using the ISO 8601 format:

• International standard. Language- and context-independent.
• Unambiguous. As different countries has different conventions, a date such as 01-04-2011 may be interpreted as either January 4 (MM-DD-YYYY) or April 1 (DD-MM-YYYY). ISO 8601 eliminates this ambiguity.
• Provides for proper sorting. As date and time values are organized from the most to the least significant, the lexicographical order of the representation thus corresponds to chronological order. This allows dates to be naturally sorted by, for example, file systems.
  • Would fix the sorting issue here.
• Scalable. The format doesn't need to change with varying precisions.
• Is the standard used by a number of other standards and technologies, including XML and other W3C standards.

(Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601)

I don't disagree - the date format here should be configurable. But if a "static" format is needed here, ISO-8601 is the best bet.

For short-term, is there any way to tweak this - even if through editing a property file outside of the Confluence Administration UI? JIRA has https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/changing-the-due-date-input-format-192536.html, for example, for a similar situation - but it doesn't appear to apply here.