Discourse local dates need better presentation in emails

(Sam Saffron) #1

The Discourse local time displays wonderful dates in the web UI. However in emails it can be very very confusing.

For example: May 19, 2018 1:03 AM (Europe: Paris), May 18, 2018 4:03 PM (America: Los Angeles) will display as May 19, 2018 9:03 AM in an emails which leaves recipients very confused.

I propose a multi step approach to improving this.

  • Immediate change… just display time zone with the time in emails so we would have May 19, 2018 9:03 AM Australia/Sydney

  • Longer term change, start storing local time zone in the user profile table (detect via JS and hand to server with a header). Then in emails we can send the times in the “last know local timezone”

  • Longer Longer term, allow users to control preferred timezone in user profile (automatic vs manually set to something)

Discourse Version 2.1
(Jeff Atwood) #3

Hmm we need to get that immediate fix in #1 for the 2.0 release at least cc @joffreyjaffeux

(Joffrey Jaffeux) #4

Working on it, but I still don’t understand why you say that it will display as May 19, 2018 9:03 AM in an email. This is not what will happen, it will display:

May 19, 2018 09:03 AM (Australia: Sidney)

The issue is that it will display all timezones set when configuring the date, and you might end up with something very verbose. So yes we will need step2, to have something cool here, so you say send this email to this user living in Australia/Sidney timezone

(Joffrey Jaffeux) #5

This is now done. We need to work on step 2 in the future, it will really make it very cool.

(Joffrey Jaffeux) #6
(Joffrey Jaffeux) #7
(Jeff Atwood) #8

I am not clear why “all” time zones need to be shown? Why not simply default to UTC in emails for now as a short term 2.0 fix?

(Joffrey Jaffeux) #9

Im showing only one now, honestly we can just put UTC if you want, if we are moving soon to something else I don’t have strong opinions on this.

(Jeff Atwood) #10

Ok one is fine that works for me!