Date / time formatting tokens

[bradchoate]

A channel might want to present a message with date/time information. Both the date and time may be important to the recipient. The presentation of the date and time should be controlled by the sender, but the date and time should be localized to the recipient.

Discord currently provides a simple mechanism for this. Embeds may carry a timestamp that is included in the footer of the embed. While the timestamp is localized when shown to the receiver, the format of the date/time cannot be customized by the sender. And the Discord client currently discards time information when the timestamp is well in the future (more than a day or so?).

Footer time included for something with today's date:

Footer time excluded for a future date:

Slack has a generalized method for handling this, and is documented here. Discord should consider adopting a similar way to encode date/time information, since channel members are often distributed across many timezones, and relaying date/time in a way that is localized is important.

Use case: A gaming guild web site exists that helps members schedule and organize game sessions. These sessions are reported via Discord to draw awareness. When a game is posted for a particular start date/time, the web site sends the announcement to their Discord server. However, the game session is announced there with a date/time in text format along with a static timezone, which is appropriate for some, but not all). Ideally, the game's date/time should be localized to the person reading the announcement so they can easily identify if it is suitable for their participation.

Cross-posted to Discord / Feedback / API.

[Lachee]

While we are on the subject for Date Time formatting, can Discord please include English AU: d/m/Y with 12h clock.

[bradchoate]

I agree with @Lachee... localization should include both adjusting to the user's local timezone, but also representing the date in a manner appropriate to their locale.

[advaith1]

this has been added #3135

[bradchoate]

I see this is working for tokens placed in messages, but it appears that when a timestamp is applied to a message, the timestamp is displayed in the footer of the message with a 'relative' style, instead of the default style used for in-message tokens. Is there a way to influence that, to force another style?

[devsnek]

You should be able to use the markdown timestamp format in the footer text.

[GoldenAngel2]

@devsnek markdown isn't supported in the footer text, so it doesn't work.

Unless that is being supported soon? or you was talking about the timestamp field

[bradchoate]

In the case I'm seeing, I think it's a timestamp associated with an embed on the message. When assigned, it displays the timestamp using a relative style. I don't see any means to use an alternate style for that.

[jmccuen]

This would also be great to add as a feature to bots who convert timezones to local... we schedule a lot of live events in Discord and often people will just say things like "On the 10th at 10Pm UK" and we would like to have a way of embedding the local time, but future events lose this info from the timestamp

[Capt-Brunch]

oh, awesome! If I am reading this correctly it's available for JS, C#, and golang but not yet for the Python API? Thanks!

There's no separate "Python API" - it's all the same API. The third-party Python libraries may not have implemented it, but you can use the API the same in any language.

[ghost]

This is a formatting thing, why do libraries have to implement it?

[jelni]

This is not language specific. It's just a markdown syntax

[advaith1]

this isn't an API feature anyway, it’s just text that you can send, rendered to a timestamp by the client

https://discord.com/developers/docs/reference#message-formatting

[jmccuen]

Yes, I didn't realize discord.py was third party -- I see exactly where in their embed code the change would need to be made (it expects a datetime.datetime for the field and errors otherwise), so might try to update it there. Thanks again!

Edit: oh, even better, I didn't realize this worked on all datetimes -- even in the text / description -- so was trying to set the timestamp field. this is perfect, thanks!