Oh dear yes the field with the actual date data appears as “registration days ago”. The other one is just a ‘pretty print’ created at listing time.
The reason is historical and hard to change without forcing a change on existing users who are using a ‘days ago’ field.
I started the plugin for myself and I wanted to see ‘days ago’ – that was more helpful for me than staring at a date and thinking ok, thats about a month/year ago. So… the registration date appears as “days ago” and one can hover over it to see the actual date in a ‘tooltip’ kinda way.
Then I had requests that some folks wanted the plain date and YES they can write their own formatting routine to display the date anyway they wanted but of course that’s a bit of coding and a little side plugin etc… so eventually I added a pseudo additional field for those folks which looks like registration date but isn’t. To not add to memory load, the field doesn’t double up – ie it doesn’t actually store the date as a duplicate, it just prints it out at listing time. The real registration date is always there anyway as it’s in the main user object. AND Thats why it is empty at csv. In the long run a new improved possibly parallel set of lists (so as not to mess with existing sites) may be available, possibly with formatting choices, kinda like the ‘linktype’, but that is a while away.
Sorry for the long explanation – basically if the csv is more important, then use “Registration days ago” – you can see the actual date on hover and it will export.
Example CSV
ID User name Registered days ago Registration date
2 someone 14/09/2012 17:37
