Software designers - how easy are website changes?

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This is a thread about MN. I know that some users are finding more major issues such as photos or not loading etc. Haven’t put in Site stuff as I just want to know if what I have asked for is possible.
I wanted to know how easy would they be to have as an option in settings if MN decide to keep default as it:

Yesterday and today instead of the date

a next number, last page, number box

Bump

I used to write s/w but not for many years so thing will have changed.

I think the yesterday & today are straightforward. It is 'just' a point of whenever you prnt a date checking if it is today or yesterday and substituting the text. The next, last, number box slightly more complicated, but we used to have them so can't be too hard.

However every 'option' you add makes code more complex and testing more complex, as you need to test more combinations of options unless you can be 100% sure that 2 options never ever overlap.

Furthermore, every option slows down the code ever so slightly making response times worse.

Also, your request will have gone into a list of probably dozens of other issues - that's not a swipe at Mumsnet, it's just realistic for any piece of software. Each of those issues will then be prioritised and worked on in order. The priority will be based on various things, such as whether it is an actual bug or just a desired change; the number of users it affects; and the complexity (and therefore cost) to resolve. They likely also gave to consider changes across browser and app versions of the software to keep things consistent. Then, each small change probably has to undergo both unit testing and regression testing. As a business I would be prioritising the things that have the most impact, so, although your change sounds pretty simple it isn't one I would be moving up the priority list.

Not a dig at MN, more just how realistic a change might be. Completely realise there are more urgent issues.

The today/yesterday thing has already been raised as have accessibility options.

It would be easy but it's not the standard way of doing things.

The date time is a timestamp stored as a literal on the database. Doing a yesterday/ today means taking that literal and doing a if - then calculation on it. Simple but another thing that takes up processing and your be amazed and what simple things can go wrong.

The pagination is done as a array. So you get the number of posts. Decide how many posts per page then work through your array based on that. To do anything else again adds more code onto that existing array.

Its four lines of code but the testing would take time and generally you should never never restore data and have one single set of truth so anything you manipulate like you date, time pagination is extra processing.

I have no idea how that fits in with MN loadtesting. If they have thousands of multiple users I suspect they want to decrease processing the data and just read and write it to the database as that's the standard simplest way?

Thanks @IncessantNameChanger that makes more sense about the extra need for testing even if the code is relatively simple.

I know this was bumped by a spammer, but I notice that yesterday & today have been implemented.

Sometimes the testing is as many lines as the code so not much extra testing. The only date / time code and testing that I found painful was daylight saving on a US database that couldn't handle GMT. Shudder.