Hey!
We have a small community for open source development. We run weekly meetings that are available for everyone to join. Every Monday, there is a message sent containing the hours for these public meetings - lots of our volunteers are on Mattermost but don’t have a calendar linked. The issue is, it’s a textfield with a specific timezone code added to the end of it. This introduces a problem of having to “translate” the time manually. While it usually isn’t an issue for regulars, there are still some situations where this introduces chaos - for instance the difference between daylight saving time - the American continent switches on different dates than Europe does. The text stays the same, the time of the meeting is different.
The feature request is about adding markdown for a timestamp and a button that launches a datepicker in the message field in the desktop app. This lets you insert a specific date and time as a timestamp. The way it would work is that after sending the message, it automatically changes the timezone in the element to the one that’s setup on the client computer. So someone in the US sees the local time of the date picked, and so do people in the EU. A similar system is implemented in Discord and is a nice quality of life feature.
What specific programming languages or frameworks are you currently using for your Mattermost integration, and do you have any preferences for how the datepicker feature should be implemented?
2. Could you clarify the existing workflow for volunteers when they receive the meeting hours? How do they currently interpret the timezone information, and what specific problems have arisen from this process?
3. Are there any design or user experience elements you envision for the datepicker and markdown timestamp feature that we should keep in mind to ensure it aligns with your community’s branding and ease of use?
For integration, no idea. I’m not the one hosting the instance. We have a whatsapp bridge, we still use Boards, that’s what I know. As for the implementation: seems like this forum has one. It looks really robust, with a lot of options if needed, and a simplified view if not. Let’s test it - 2025-08-21T13:10:00Z
This is how we do it - we have a message with links so people can click on them to join, and a text “field” for an hour in EDT. The biggest issue I’ve faced, was the daylights savings, it messes things up for two weeks twice a year it switches over - one week because the other continent changed the time, then another because ours did and you shouldn’t come to meetings early anymore. It’s a small, yet annoying disruption that has caused me and other people to miss some meetings. Also, sometimes I mess up the difference between timezones, which wouldn’t happen if I saw the local time. Another thing is that people do a lot of travelling and join the meetings, so the timezones may change for them and they’d need to keep track of it.
3. Again, this forum has a great implementation of how it could look. It’s easy to use, yet robust, offers scheduling, formatting, etc. If it’s too much work, the important thing would be the ability to set the date and timezone or several, and switch between them when needed, but localtime being shown as the “default” without user interaction
Here to +1 this feature request. It became an absolutely essential feature right when Discord implemented it for global work coordination. People get timezones wrong all the damn time and it’s much easier when you can use a tool like discordtimestamp.com to generate a dynamic timestamp that shows in the person’s own timezone. Our org recently moved from Discord to Mattermost and I am very much missing this feature.
