Whenever an author creates a new, or updates, a topic, they also say when it was last updated, which is nice. But there is no set way to do that. Some authors do the European style of day/month/year, or some do it the American way of month/day/year. I know that it can be figured out other ways if one just looked for context clues, but still, it might be useful if there was a set rule for dating posts.
Also this would be my first post on this forum.