Discord Timestamp Generator

How to use it

1. Pick the date and time of your event. The time zone starts as yours; change it when the time was announced somewhere else, for example “8 PM New York time”.
2. Copy the code for the style you like and paste it into a Discord message. Everyone who reads it sees the time converted to their own time zone and language.
3. For an event that starts a set time from now, use Countdown to an event: enter days, hours and minutes and copy a ready-made countdown.
4. To check a timestamp someone else posted, paste it into the decoder. It also accepts a whole message, a plain Unix time, or a Discord ID (message, user or server) and tells you when that ID was created. If a code would show up as plain text, it tells you why.

What each style letter means

The code looks like <t:1618953630:F>: a Unix time in seconds, then an optional style letter. Letters are case-sensitive. Examples below are for 1618953630 as a US reader in Central time sees it:

Leaving the letter out, as in <t:1618953630>, gives the same result as f. The s and S styles are newer additions to Discord’s documented styles, so check that they render in your app before relying on them. Readers with a different language setting see their own format: English (UK) uses a 24-hour clock and day-first dates.

How it works

A Discord timestamp stores a single moment as the number of seconds since 1 January 1970 UTC, known as Unix time. Earlier moments are negative numbers: the Moon landing, 20 July 1969 at 20:17:40 UTC, is <t:-14182940:F>. The code carries no time zone at all: each reader’s app formats that moment in their own time zone. The time zone you choose here is only used to turn the clock time you typed into that number.

Around daylight saving changes some clock times happen twice and some never happen. For a repeated time the generator uses the first occurrence; for a skipped time (such as 2:30 AM on a spring-forward night) it moves forward by the length of the gap, and it tells you when either happens.

Countdowns for events

The R style is the one to use for anything upcoming: each reader’s app recalculates it, so “in 2 hours” counts down by itself and becomes “2 hours ago” once the moment has passed. On its own it can be vague (“in a day” covers about 22 to 36 hours), so pair it with a clock time for events later today, <t:1618953630:t> (<t:1618953630:R>), or with the full date for later days, <t:1618953630:F> (<t:1618953630:R>). The countdown helper builds both and can round the start to a clean time, such as the nearest quarter hour.

Tips

• Discord expects seconds. JavaScript’s Date.now() returns milliseconds, so divide by 1000 first. A 13-digit number pasted into <t:...> does not show the date you meant.
• Bots can build the same codes: discord.py has discord.utils.format_dt(dt, style="R"), and discord.js has the time() helper with TimestampStyles.
• To find when a message was sent, turn on Developer Mode in Discord’s settings, choose Copy Message ID and paste the ID into the decoder. The creation time is stored in the ID itself: the top 42 bits are milliseconds since the start of 2015.