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On the desktop site, when looking at posts that are recent enough, sometimes the site just says "1 hour ago."

An image of Stormblessed's profile with "answered 1 hour ago" above it

However, if I hover over it, it shows a nice little timestamp:

A timestamp saying the exact time the post is from on Stormblessed's profile

I would love to be able to see post timestamps on the mobile site. While posts that are old enough show the hour and minute they are from, it is, as far as I know, impossible to get these for recent posts.

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  • On hover works for me on the mobile view in Chrome. Is this a specific issue for mobile-safari? – rene Apr 20 at 17:05
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    @rene how do you hover on your phone? Holding my finger on the “__ hours ago” doesn’t work in mine in Safari or Firefox – Stormblessed Apr 20 at 17:27
  • I assume it should be replaced with a touch event but a quick search shows that is lacking on more places. The data is there so it shouldn't be much of a problem. – rene Apr 20 at 18:38
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    Possible duplicate of Detect mobile browsers and change hover behavior accordingly. While the examples it offers are "comment upvote" and "flag" (and those are fixed), there are half a dozen 'hover touchscreen' not working complaints. Being a touchscreen user I wish they'd change the library and get this working on all touchscreens/Browsers/OSes. – Rob Apr 21 at 3:22
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    @Rob Not a duplicate. That doesn't mention tooltips, but rather buttons (a.k.a. site functionality). – Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog Apr 21 at 3:45
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    @SonictheWizardWerehog It's hovering, in general, on whatever. We welcome a better duplicate because when there are two or three they all get shown on the top 'Duplicate Banner'., so additional suggestions are useful. – Rob Apr 21 at 4:04
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While posts that are old enough show the hour and minute they are from, it is, as far as I know, impossible to get these for recent posts.

It is possible to see the proper timestamp for any post - but it is a bit of a faff. As it requires several steps to see the timestamp for each post and isn't a simple matter of hovering over the time, this is really a workaround.

You can go to the timeline (an experimental feature of the site) of any post by copying the URL of the "edit" link at the bottom, and changing the /edit to /timeline.

For your question, that means changing {MSE}/posts/327106/edit to {MSE}/posts/327106/timeline. The page then shows an itemised list of events that have happened to it (reviews, comments, etc.). The event at the bottom is when it was created - in this case, when you asked the question.

timeline for the question with short date and time format

This shows times as they appear in the normal view, (e.g. me answering your question says "4 mins ago"). If you want more precision than just MMM d ['yy] at H:mm then click (or tap) the "toggle format" link near the top. That will change the times from the short date and time format to the ISO 8601 date and time format (note that daily summaries, which are provided at the end of the day, never have the time specified):

timeline for the question with ISO 8601 date and time format

As I said, though, this is a bit of a faff - as a regular mobile user it's annoying to have to do this every time I want to see the exact timestamp for a post.

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