This week, we received the following question (which we've receive periodically):

"As you probably already know, As I sort your auctions by year ascending, I am now getting newer items as they also say in their description '03, '04 etc. Your system ranks them as old."

We replied as follows:

"This is a temporary problem that gets automatically resolved a few hours after the auctions begin (I'll spare you all the technical details). Suffice it to say that it is because, as you say, when abbreviated as "'03", "1903" looks the same as "2003" and are therefore sorted that way until our automated code "fixes" it a few hours after the auctions have begun.

"This should always be true, but of course, if you ever find I am wrong and it is sorted incorrectly even the morning after items have begun at auction, tell me which auction gallery you are looking at and I will investigate further."

But this brings up a larger issue. When we first launched out Auction History Database in 1999, we foolishly entered movie titles as two digits (so a 1959 movie was entered as '59). That did not cause a problem THEN, but as the years passed, and we started auctioning more and more posters from the 2000's, that started creating odd problems in our database (like the infamous "Year 2K" problem that credit card companies faced when their card "expiration" dates only had two digits).

This is more of a minor annoyance than a major problem but we have a plan in the future to switch to four digit years ("2003" instead of "03"), and then it will no longer be an issue. But it is complicated because our entire system was entirely designed with this "the old way" and it will take time to make the change.