There's no technical reason preventing this from happening. Someone only needs to pull the tstamp field from the message table, parse it, and display it. The showchatter htmlcode node has most of the logic. That coder should also probably factor out time formatting into something both the chat and inbox can use.

Actually, the private message hover titles are already formatted using reusable code (that uses the user's own date format). The public chatter messages are formatted differently in a way that doesn't make sense for private messages (public chatter is never more than 500 seconds old so including the hour, much less the date, is a bit redundant and would require timezone awareness) and so doesn't need to be used anywhere else (at least not yet).

PodMaster created a patch (quite a while ago) to show timestamps on private messages but didn't follow the formatting done in the chatterbox (it includes the timestamp as "tye said {message} on {date}"). In the pmdev wiki I mentioned that I didn't like it because it has the dates unaligned (and adds not a small amount of clutter compared to the old/current presentation) but that I can understand some wanting all of the dates visible at once (instead of in hover titles like I was hoping for). theorbtwo also contributed to the discussion.

So far, this thread makes me switch back to more strongly favoring the hover titles just so I don't have to worry about changing the look of a node (and the inevitable complaints that result).

But I haven't seen even close to a consensus on the design (I'd only seen 3 takes on the matter, including my own) nor a patch that I feel is appropriate to apply. Recent events have reinforced my reluctance to apply patches hastily, especially when they affect how the site looks.

                - tye

I hadn't even noticed the hover title; that's very nice.

There's not a lot of room left in Message Inbox for more information. It's pretty crowded as is. Hoverdates might be the best, unless there's a better way to present the data.

C.