Please expand timestamp formatting / availability
The ability to format timestamps in Discord is an absolute life-saver when communicating across time zones, but it could be made much better. I want to make a suggestion that's essentially twofold, but they both have the goal of making timestamps easier to use.
The first and most important step to making this feature more usable is increasing access to it. Right now it's basically a hidden feature, so hardly anyone uses it. But if it were to get a widget similar to the emoji menu, where you can simply select the date/time and the format, it would reach a much wider audience and see more use. tbh I personally find it quite bothersome to have to use external tools to make a timestamp and I would *really* prefer if Discord were able to help me using *some* kind of widget so I don't have to rely on google or third party apps to help me.
The second step is less important, but basically, timestamps would become more useful if people were able to more freely format them according to their needs. Right now you can e.g. only use a "long date + short time" format if you want to pair date + time. And while you can get around this by using two separate timestamps, one thing you *can't* get around is having to display both short and long time if you want to give someone a day of the week.
Additionally (though use cases for this are rarer), you can't mark up the timestamp for a specific timezone. It's always local time, and while that's great, it feels like timestamps are a feature that could easily be expanded to help with translating the message author's local time into a format that's the same for everyone.
Finally, and this is the *least* important bit of step 2, is to allow people to customise the order/combination of formatting. This doesn't have to be as advanced as it is in many programming languages. But it'd be great to be given the ability to add parts of a timestamp format independently. To go back to the day of the week thing, I could for instance wish to format a date as "weekday + short time". So if I were able to specify those two bits independently as part of the same formatting instruction, that would be fantastic.
Essentially, to give an example of how I envision the above, instead of e.g. the current "F" format (long weekday, long date, short time) it might make sense to specify it as a "WDt" format. So that's the "long weekday" + "long date" + "short time" specified independently, but as part of the same instruction. These smaller parts can be treated as the "atoms" of the timestamp formatting system, i.e. the user doesn't concern themselves with how they work internally, they're just the building blocks Discord provides to build a timestamp from. Allowing multi-letter combinations would also allow this to be backwards-compatible with the current system which I assume is a priority.
Here's a quick list of the format "atoms" I'd wish to see implemented in this way because the current format is missing them.
- Long weekday (e.g. Monday)
- Long date w/o year (e.g. January 15)
There are of course more possibilities than just these (such as a short date w/o year or a short weekday), but these two are the most important in my view because they represent a way to show a smaller relevant part of a date in a way that's not possible using the current system. How granular it's possible to get is of course entirely up to the implementation, but I feel like these two formats, added to the formats that are already possible, plus the ability to combine them together, would cover essentially all cases for which the formatting system is currently unsuitable (aside from really really niche ones, anyway).
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That is a great suggestion. I just don't agree about the button. It could just be with a prefix like mentioning users/channels.
On the other part, I don't think that making the timestamp more customizable is worth the work. "premade" options are good enough in my opinion.0
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