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EionRobb / purple-discord

A libpurple/Pidgin plugin for Discord
GNU General Public License v3.0
382 stars 43 forks source link

/commands don't understand timestamp format from chat window #428

Open LurkerHub opened 2 years ago

LurkerHub commented 2 years ago

The message timestamp displays in my chat window as either h:mm:ss AM/PM or M/D/YYYY h:mm:ss AM/PM with no apparent option to control the format.

Commands such as /reply expect the timestamp in a different format, and manually formatting them takes too much time when participating in a fast-paced discussion with many participants.

iv4nhoe commented 2 years ago

Not a solution to the issue of mismatching timestamp formats but it should help your situation: If you reply/react to a message of "today" (which you probably do in a fast paced discussion) you can leave out the date. So typing /reply 13:56:21 <your reply> is not too bad.

dlmarquis commented 2 years ago

While this isn't really a solution to the issue, the default/bundled Pidgin plugin "Message Timestamp Formats" should allow you some control over the timestamp format in chat windows.

This issue is on my radar---I originally locked the timestamp format for commands to ISO-8601 to prevent excessive locale-specific testing overhead, with the intent of coming back to it after more research. Right now, nearly all my libdiscord time is going into refactoring the plugin's startup sequence to stamp out a bunch of history-fetching bugs (that code was designed for a Discord API that predates my involvement in the project, and hasn't changed much since---eek), but this is on my shortlist of "small" issues to look at before attempting any more issues that require major rewrites.

For posterity, the proper format for a date+time-stamp is YYYY-MM-DDtHH:MM:SS, with the t being plaintext (e.g., 2022-04-29t15:32:45).

LurkerHub commented 2 years ago

That plugin only shows an option to switch between 12h and 24h, not to fully customize it. I also could not find any documentation on it.

The best option would be for Pidgin to allow customizable (by plugins) action menu on messages, by right-clicking them, or displaying a widget. Unfortunately it looks like the conversation windows (and by extension, the history) is just a rich-text control, that knows nothing about the actual messages. That, coupled with the lack of a message DB, makes Pidgin unsuitable for anything but the most basic chat functionality. I looked at Miranda NG as an alternative but they gave up on Discord completely and 95% of my contacts only use Discord. Bleh.

It's not the 90s anymore, AIM is not the state of the art.

I could live with copypasting timestamps, but manually reformatting them is disruptive.