This is a really small thing, but when I create a new invite link (today 28th May) the offset dates provided in the UI don’t match the labels, e.g.:
I only noticed this because a link timed out much earlier than I thought it would, and I think the “next month” selection really would choose 1st June as the offset, rather than 28th June.
Sorry, I don’t understand your post? What is in the screenshot looks correct to me? Can you explain in a bit more detail what you think is wrong?
2 months from 28th May is not 1st July.
Right, but the intent is “when we change from one month to the next month”. The next month begins on June 1st, yes? Then the next month after that begins July 1st, yes?
“Your invite is good until the end of the month” is easier to explain, and more properly captures the intent, versus “your invite expires on a completely random day in the middle of the month”.
This makes sense to me. I’ve run into the opposite issue with bookmark timers. With timed bookmarks, when the “Next Week” option is selected, the date is set to 7 days in the future, but my assumption about what next week means is Monday of the following week. I’m not sure which approach to setting future dates is the best, but it might be worth using a consistent approach to it throughout the UI.
Yes! This isn’t where this goes, but I’m confused by that every time!
Yeah I think some stuff was lost in translation when we were working on this feature @martin. Perhaps you can tweak the dates to better reflect the intent expressed above?
Remind me of this when a shiny fresh new week / month begins!
That’s what we meant, not “let me know in exactly 7 days from this day”. or “let me know in exactly 30 days from this day”.
We have Monday an option explicitly for that:
If Next Week meant “at the start of next week” we wouldn’t need the Monday option.
This is really confusing because we have discussed this previously and we have a work in progress PR to bring the invite/other future date inputs into line with what bookmarks and topic timers do: FEATURE: make future-date-input consistent with other components and customizable by AndrewPrigorshnev · Pull Request #12985 · discourse/discourse · GitHub
So do we want to universally say that all of these options for the “week” and “month” level should mean “At the start of next week”, “at the beginning of the week two weeks from now”, and “at the beginning of next month”? From what I can tell the months already follow that behaviour, it’s just the weeks that don’t. We would need to remove the Monday option from bookmarks too in that case because it will be irrelevant.
The wording of “Two months” says to me “now + two months” not “at the start of the month two months from now”, so we need to tweak that too I think. @andrei has been working on that WIP PR so maybe he can take this?
You have to look at the original intent, which was Google GMail:
I think we kinda lost sight of the goal somewhere along the way, but you can see this is very “next time interval” oriented, as in:
That was always my intent, and I tried to be quite clear about this, but I think we played a game of “telephone” and stuff got garbled in translation along the way, somehow… here’s my original post from November 2019…
Note that, again, it’s the same focus:
And then you have your arbitrary times, which is fine to have, but that’s never been the primary focus of this dialog… it’s fine to include arbitrary times as an extra, but “an arbitrary 5 days from this particular date” isn’t as immediately useful as “when/until the next week begins”, “when/until the next month begins”, “when/until the work day ends and the evening begins”, “when/until the next month begins”, “when/until the weekend begins”, and so on…
So coming back to invites, the logic should be the same:
I think we lost our way a bit on this feature. Should be OK with some adjustments though… all the tools are there.
The above 
was definitely the intent, per all the GMail examples provided. When you say
Remind me about this tomorrow
Remind me about this next week
Remine me about this next month
You mean
Remind me about this when the next day begins
Remind me about this when the next week begins
Remind me about this when the next month begins
not
Remind me about this in exactly 24 hours
Remind me about this in exactly 7 days
Remind me about this in exactly 30 days (also – not all months have the same # of days!)
Adding an “arbitrary x days from right now” option is completely fine as an additional option, but wasn’t the goal. So for reference @martin or @andrei, whoever ends up working on this. I think you can do both, and there’s always going to be an “arbitrary date” option, but the idea is people think primarily in intervals of “until the next major calendar event” – whether that is a new day, the weekend, a new week, or a new month.
Fwiw this all makes sense now, but my query was in part because we had agreed an internal policy of not having invite links open for more than a month. The chunked future date input makes that hard. I understand the idea though, although when one is near the end of a month it makes the first selection less likely to be useful.
You’ll always be able to do arbitrary dates as well as date offsets; no functionality is being removed.
