I noticed, in the new chatroom update a few months ago, it says what time a message was sent, in the user’s timezone. So somehow the chatroom knows our timezones…
I wonder if it’s possible if I could say something like, I will be back at 2:00pm, and everyone else would see “2:00pm” as their own timezone… So someone might see 1:00pm, someone else may see 3:00pm?
I wonder if it’s possible if I could say something like, I will be back at 2:00pm, and everyone else would see “2:00pm” as their own timezone… So someone might see 1:00pm, someone else may see 3:00pm?
There are several potential issues at play with something so “natural”:
People sometimes say “2:00pm my time” so this would need to filter that out / work around that. If I say “2:00pm my time” and we’re an hour apart, I don’t want you seeing “3:00pm my time.”
We’d need to do more than just a simple hh:mm swap. If I say “Saturday at 10:00pm I will be going live,” I don’t want that translating for someone else who’s 3 hours ahead as “Saturday at 1:00am,” when in reality it should say Sunday for them.
Other phrases like “3pm” or “6 o clock” would need to be factored in
This would risk messing up people who point to timestamps in videos, we wouldn’t want “Click [here], skip to 1:40” to be changed to 2:40 for others who are an hour ahead, since that’s an entirely different part of the video!
Even if I solve this 100% for every possible way someone can write a date… I then have to worry about other languages. Not as simple as swapping out “tomorrow” or “yesterday” for a translation, since their grammar can be entirely different as well.
The best solution would be to have a method to let users explicitly insert a timestamp into their message, with a date-time picker, and the time they select is then shown to all users in their respective itmezones. Which itself isn’t a bad idea, but it’s a bit cumbersome, and requires folks to actually choose to remember it exists… Far less elegant than the proposed suggestion.