Topic timers' use wrong dates

UX
1

Today is 2019.02.22.
That is Friday 22, febrauary, 2019.

Initially i wanted to set a topic timer for closing a topic in a week. By a week i expected 7 days.
The problem with the current discourse timeframe is that there is no such option except if today would be monday, or i would pick the specific date.

Lets’ see in this picture:
image

  • “next week”: means Monday 25.02.2019. That is just 3 days from now.
    Taking into account the 2 weekend days (where people in a company for example may not visit the forum), this may leave a group with only 1 day to comment on a topic before it is closed.

  • “two weeks”: means Friday 08.03.2019. That is 14 days from now.
    2 weeks exactly, but also on a different timescale compared to what “next week” adds (compare 3 days vs 14).

  • “next month”: means Friday 01.03.2019. That is just 1 week from now.
    What if today was 27th of February – in this case in just 2 days the topic will be closed, even though i would expect it to remain open for a whole 30 more days.

I believe these “times” we are presented are unintuitive and don’t reflect what the user would like to happen. At least in this particular user’s case they don’t.

This issue really bugs me since i use topic timers to remind myself of things, and most often than not this timers do remind me but sooner than what i wanted or force me to do many more clicks for the “customised date and time”.

I suggest that next week means 7 days from now, and also that next month means 30 days from now.

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2

Gmail does the same thing.

image

I guess everyone uses those timers differently. I use “Next week” quite often, because I usually want to be reminded of something at the beginning of my next work week. I can’t remember ever using “Two weeks” or “Next month” in Discourse. I always pick a date when I want to be reminded on a specific date.

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3

https://meta.discourse.org/t/timed-reopen-of-topic/60167/27?u=tgxworld

To add on, we actually referenced what gmail snooze was using for the time range.

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4

I admit i have never used gmail’s snooze feature, but seeing it now i agree it uses the same relative times.
However i still don’t find the dates (especially the “next week”) to be to my particular taste.

I almost never use 2 weeks as well, so may i suggest that instead of “2 weeks” we could add 7 days?
(i also think that adding too many entries would make the dialog look rather crowded)

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5

I’ve run into this too, I think one reason against it is that on Mondays “Next week” and “In 7 days” are identical.

Personally I agree that I’d use “in 7 days” more often than “two weeks” (but in a work environment “two weeks” does fit the common scenario of taking a week off)

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I argue here that taking a week off is not a common scenario :smiley: (i mean i would love to have more than 25 holiday days – but that’s not gonna happen very soon :smiley: )

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