Mark,

Elsewhere Duane said:

I use https://groups.io/ to see if there are any pending posts or
members on any of my groups. Once that's taken care of, I click on the
All button to the left. That brings up a list of the threads of all the
groups I'm in, newest first, so I can scroll down and start reading
around the time I was last on. This is where it would be really nice to
have the date and time instead of 'x minutes ago' or 'y hours ago'.

So, how about wherever a relative time is shown, provide a hover text with the absolute date/time (user's time zone, of course)?

Bonus: a profile option to swap those (display absolute, tool-tip the relative time), or
https://trello.com/c/sAS6woCj/4-date-format-in-profiles

-- Shal
p.s.: http://xkcd.com/1179/