Display of tiles on library.kiwix.org should show date of archive

[Jaifroid]

See discussion here. There are sometimes two or more ZIM archives with the same content but published/scraped on different dates. There is also no way to identify from the tile whether you are looking at a new ZIM or the same one you might already have, say, on a thumb drive, due to lack of information that allows you to identify that an archive is recent.

Personally I would like to see the exact ZIM archive name appear on the tile, as this gives maximum info (including date) to the user looking to differentiate archives, but I understand this is considered technical information and not so useful for the average user.

If filename is not provided, then at least date should be, IMHO.

[mgautierfr]

Agree.
My personal preference goes to reunit such zim archives into only one tile.
By default the tile would open the "best" version. But user could select the best date/variant/flavor. See kiwix/libkiwix#421 (comment)
But it is a far more complex work. Displaying the date (at least) is a good solution for now.

[kelson42]

First of all, the library should always provide only the most recent version of a zim, we should never provide an old and a new version of the same zim in the library. As a consequence, the user can assume that it is always the latest version. Showing the date of the ZIM file to compare two books is therefore here not a topic.

That said this is a metadata which can be usefull for a few scenarios, @Jaifroid has named one… even if IMO people having already Kiwix should use he internal downloader/library mgmt and this one should make this comparison easy anyway.

Side topic is the ability to differenciate different ZIM which is really weak so far but not related to dates. It’s mostly caused by:

• Bad meta-data
• Lack of visibility of flavours
  But these topics are treated in other tickets already.

The problem here is that we don’t want to show the date at first look because it make not that much sense, but it would be better to have it made available somehow. I believe we need an extended/expanded version of the tiles able to display more…

[Jaifroid]

The main problem is that from a user's perspective it's really hard to find out if the offered ZIM is one which they already have or not. They may discover after some experimentation that by hovering over the tile the file name may be revealed by the browser, but this depends on the browser (e.g. desktop vs mobile where "hovering" is not a thing), but it really should be easier than that. I don't believe that this is a job that should be left to the reader (software) because there are many legitimate reasons why a user would wish to download an archive outside of an app (portability is key to offline usage of ZIM archives in low-connectivity scenarios: e.g. storing on a USB stick).