A new “Show local time” feature has been introduced for the Discourse Calendar plugin, allowing events to display times in the venue’s timezone. j.jaffeux announced the feature, which is useful for in-person events and live streams. Users nathank and sam discussed potential improvements, including simplifying date/time display formats for clarity—such as using “Sun 7th, 5:30pm → 6:30pm”—and handling edge cases like repeating events and timezone display in emails. sam also reported a bug with date formatting, which j.jaffeux acknowledged and began addressing. yuriy contributed code to refine the date display logic, including handling ranges across days, months, and years, and proposed guidelines for showing timezones and relative dates (e.g., “Yesterday/Today/Tomorrow” vs. weekday names). The first pull request for these changes has been merged, with further refinements expected.
You can now display event times in the timezone where your event takes place! 
This new feature adds a simple “Show local time” option that displays event dates and times using the timezone you’ve selected, helping attendees understand when events occur in their physical location.
Perfect for:
For more details on the Calendar plugin and all its features, check out the official Calendar topic.
Will this also be reflected in the notification emails for the event? Or is that still locked in with the recently updated site-wide mechanism:
Nice because some folks will be in different time zones especially if the event is for a live stream event using the cool live stream plugin
No it’s only on the client for now, mails are tricky.
@j.jaffeux this feels a bit loud:
Perhaps we change this to:
“Sun–Fri, Sep 7–12, 5:30pm–6:30pm”
It is so much clearer and 5:30pm can still be a link for people who want the date widget.
IF
Also we have a bug:
Should be 7…
Totally agree that this needs to be simpler / more refined! Abbreviations are appropriate, and year / time zone only need to be displayed in certain circumstances.
I find this doesn’t work for me as it is quite jarring to have the actual date/times split up into three different chunks. May I suggest this as an alternative, where year, month, and day are only displayed once unless the date range traverses more than one of them?
If same year:
“5:30pm Sun 7 Sep - 6:30pm Fri 12 Sep 2025”
If same month:
“5:30pm Sun - 6:30pm Fri Sep 2025”
If same day then:
“5:30pm - 6:30pm Sun 7 Sep 2025”
This makes no sense to me; it describes an event that starts on Sunday and ends on Friday.
My text is a 1-hour event that repeats 6 times. It looks pretty clear to me.
Haven’t been able to repro this.
You need to set your local timezone to australia and have some event at 10pm france time for 1 hour.
Ok, I tried similar things, but will try this exact thing 
It’s a very big change to do this, because then I can’t have a date for each of them and allow to click to see date in your timezone for example. So it’s a lot of assumptions to change.
Can we settle on something like:
Sun 7th, 5:30pm -> Fri 12th, 6:30pm
This is confusing to me, maybe
Sun 7th, 5:30pm → 6:30pm, daily till Fri 12th
Then when it is 6:31pm on Sunday, you show:
Mon 8th, 5:30pm → 6:30pm, daily till Fri 12th
Just this then: Mon 7th, 5:30pm → 6:30pm
Also I don’t get this:
How do you know it’s in the local timezone then?
Why 12 hours? All we want to know is if it’s in the same day no?
info about the repeat is very useful on repeat events, it give a lot more clarity.
The event has that ticked.
This feature and rendering is exclusively for show local time on. If people don’t want that they don’t tick it.
Yes I know, but end users don’t know
Maybe, even though I don’t see it in most calendar, do you? Google shows it when you click the detail of an event, honestly I never looked at it. I just see it’s showing every week in my calendar.
And again it’s a lot of work and cases to handle, and translations…
In any case even if we want to show it, I recommend we don’t show it inside the dates link. But somewhere else in the UI.
I think they do, this is for local events:
None of that is ambiguous or needs timezones.
–
The repeat info is gold plating, the minimum here is improving the rendering for short events.
September 7, 2025 5:30PM (CET) → September 7, 2025 6:30 PM (CET) is just too much text.
Sun, Sep 7, 5:30PM → 6:30PM is already 100x better.
Meetup.com does this:
I get why they put AEST there, it is they host local events for many many countries and need to make sure stuff is super clear.
But they are significantly more efficient with text
The compact display they go with is:
You have to “click the event” to see duration.
The use case is a bit different to running a single event on Discourse, we may eventually have to cater for both
