It really is VERY simple. The onus is on the purchaser of the ticket to validate that ticket by dating it, by pen, with leading zeroes on the dates, before attempting to travel. Any travel undertaken without following the rules is potentially fraudulent - and may be viewed as such by revenue staff.
Okay so as far as I can see there is nothing in the NRCOT that is obvious about validating tickets, but it is quite clears about tampering with tickets, which according to some staff includes any mark/fold/etc made by a customer onto a ticket!
NRCOT said:
4.7. You should not tamper with a Ticket in any way. If you do so it will not be valid for travel.
This is from a specific page on the NRE web site for FOSS3in7 - seems to cast some doubt on whether its the passenger or "railway" that needs to validate this ticket. It also doesn't specify that what order boxes should be filled in. It does specify a black pen, which is interesting seeing the random colours guards can apparently use to squiggle on tickets and for these to have some kind of "official meaning".
NRE Web site said:
When a passenger needs to self validate a Rover ticket, the date of travel should be completed in black ink using numerical values only for 'Day' and 'Month' eg 07 09 for travel on 7th September.
The Rover will need to be validated before the first journey on that day commences.
If I read the text "numerical values
only" without the example, then I'll be honest I would have dated the example given date given as 7/9, as a perfectly reasonable thing to do, I would have thought it was to prevent me from writing stuff like 7th Sep.
It should say like "using numerical values, with a leading zero when required (dd-mm)"
And as a final nit pick (using the ticket form the first post) the ticket didn't EXPIRE 04-FBY-20 [Ooh look a different date format!!!], its more a case of something like VALID SELECTED DATES 29-JNR-20 TO 04-FBY-20, otherwise it would be possible to argue that its valid for the dates that are written in AND 4th February
Its an age old case, again, of where some simple changes where tickets and information given on them could be so much simpler for both passengers and staff (especially given that a rover ticket leads to the production of another ticket, so space isn't an issue)