Show ROBLOX Time

When you see your messages you can see when they were sent: 12-3-2016 4:32 am.

Issue is, It’s not my timezone its some random timezone so that 4:32am doesnt tell me much.
I would suggest a simple clock text above the messages showing the current time.

That would be all, thank you.

3 Likes

btroblox fixes this fyi

Better yet, display dates in human readable formats.

Something happened five minutes ago? Display as “5 minutes ago”. Roughly an hour ago? “One hour ago”. To know the exact date and time something was done, hover over it. At a certain point (more than 24 hours) a full time stamp should be used. This is how nearly every popular platform on the web does it, including Twitter and Facebook. I don’t see it being very hard to implement on Roblox.

11 Likes

http://devforum.roblox.com/t/i-really-wish-roblox-would-use-local-timezones-versus-only-pacific/12455

It’s been requested for ages, we haven’t got a reply yet, but I am sure there’s a valid reason for this not being fixed.

I got a some-what reply when I made a feature request a long time ago saying that “local time zones will be implemented soon in messages and hopefully, local currency” in conf tags

Adding this to also infrom about how timezones are different on different parts of the website.

-Group shouts and wall posts
-Forum posts
-Place update times (expanded with (#hours ago) time)
-Ban/Warning pages
-Asset versions (decals, models, shirts)
-Place versions

And apparently the forums operate on a completely different timezone too.

This is usually pretty straightforward to implement using this JavaScript library, in case ROBLOX wants to allocate any web team interns towards this :sweat_smile:

Why do it client side and clog up the browser when you can do it server side?

1 Like

Huh? Why would you “clog up” the server with having to compute everyone’s time in their timezone when you can just send them a UTC timestamp and have them compute the right stuff locally?

Because it’s unnecessary JS :frowning:

1 Like

Pretty good point :grin: Doing it server-side is a good, speedy solution if it’s always going to be in that relative format, and if all the timestamps and server times are consistent (i.e. if they’re not doing something spooky like computing the displayed time based on the specific web server’s time zone, which seems to possibly be close to the case).

If you need to display the actual, non-relative time at any point, however, ideally that’s going to be in the client’s timezone. There’s a few ways to go about this from the server, such as providing a user setting for their timezone (cost: extra web interface to build, extra complexity in computing just the time for every API request, extra server-side database or cache hits, possibly extra database structure planning/modification), or passing the user’s timezone in every request (cost: extra complexity in requirements for request-performing code from the client, extra time computation code complexity in server-side API code, etc).

So obviously if it’s the latter case, it might be a better option to just include a minified, compressed, client-side JS library that gets cached on the browser (no extra loading time), that checks raw timestamps and converts them into formatted local time. :stuck_out_tongue: (a positive byproduct is also that server-side code could then be simplified by sending over the actual, raw timestamp without formatting, since the client handles that and displays it in an actually useful way).

2 Likes