Show timestamp instead of "X minutes ago" in conversation view

[hinestechworkacct]

Less a bug than a suggestion to make life easier on both us and you.
I don't know how to do flair, or I'd post it as a "Feature Request"

Currently the time stamp dynamically updates with how many minutes ago the message occurred. Wouldn't it be less operation for it to just be a timestamp? I know you have a timestamp, since I can get the info on each individual message. But when I'm searching through a lot of messages (our IT dept uses Signal for messaging exclusively) it makes it unnecessarily time consuming to see if "5 hours ago" is 5 hours, 1 minute, or 5 hours, 59 minutes, and even so, if I'm looking for a message from 7:37am, it's a lot easier to just find that time stamp, than think whether that's "2 hours ago" or "3 hours ago"

Thanks for considering my post!

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

You can always find the exact timestamp by clicking on the message to get into the message details screen. It won't make the scan easier, but you will be able to verify the exact time once you have a candidate in your search.

[gasi-signal]

@hinestechworkacct Another way to get this information is to hover over the the current timestamp to get a full view, e.g. hover on 8 Minutes

[GuardianMajor]

While it is available on hover, an option to choose relative vs absolute would be great. There are times you need to share something in the form of a screenshot and having relative times makes the context a bit useless. Yes, you can hover while you take the screenshot but then you are putting emphasis on the wrong part of what the screenshot was meant for. Just a sample use-case where having absolute timestamps would be preferred.

[gasi-signal]

@GuardianMajor Thanks for the suggestion. That’s definitely an option (no pun intended). In the light of limited resources (just two full-time people on desktop) and our general philosophy of minimizing various settings, this will most likely not prioritized in the near future unless we get much more user demand. Thanks for your understanding.

[breversa]

Here's another user demand for an absolute/relative option. :-)

[GuardianMajor]

: TL/DR/RL
@gasi-signal I understand and I appreciate simplicity as much as the next person, trust me - I am a minimalist at heart. However, sometimes hard work on a quality product gets muted in favor of crappy alternatives because of lack of certain features/options/capabilities/etc. Think adoption rate and while that may not always be an important metric for a great project, it feels a waste of great talented work if it doesn't reach a wider audience for reasons that can be very easily implemented/mitigated even on limited resources.

That being said, I respect the choices of the design team and will just hope it comes. In the meantime, I will try and provide some pulls to help out - assuming they are not rejected simply because we don't want to provide users options. That should hopefully help bridge the "resource" gab that the two man team has to carry - how's that? I love the project, I promote it, push it and evangelize for it even, so I want to see it be the complete kick ass all around solution it can be, that's all. I just hate when people say, yeah but it doesn't have this/do that and actually be reasonably right about it 😞

[hinestechworkacct]

@gasi-signal - good to know about the hover on the desktop version, but naturally that doesn't fare so well on cellular devices. Our IT department personnel is required to use it on both phone and desktop.

I definitely appreciate @GuardianMajor thinking bigger picture with the screenshot, not sure why I didn't think of that myself.

[gasi-signal]

@GuardianMajor Thanks for the great write-up and being a champion for this project! We’ve recently expanded our design team from zero to one and I brought this issue to their attention. Most likely we’ll want to address this in a consistent way across all of our apps, so we’ll report back once we’ve made a decision 😄

[gasi-signal]

@GuardianMajor One random idea I had was: What if we offered a keyboard shortcut to temporarily toggle the timestamps to absolute format for situations like screenshots or getting an overview, etc.? This could potentially avoid making our settings longer. Would that satisfy your needs?

[GuardianMajor]

@gasi-signal Absolutely, that would certainly be a useful alternative, I was even thinking passing through command line as a parameter (like the min-to-tray) as it is now, but yeah that would be even more natural from a UX perspective and requires less "messing" with the command line, excellent thought my friend. 👍

I am an old school CLI and keyboard for most everything anyway, so for me that would be just as excellent as any GUI option and in time we might be able to address the ones who prefer the "menu" aka point and click option too or convert them 😀

[6lancmange]

THIS, oh my god. I don't understand why you would even choose "x minutes ago" as the default option. The older messages magically turn to absolute time anyway!

[hinestechworkacct]

@gasi-signal Would that work in mobile?

[gasi-signal]

@hinestechworkacct Having a full-time designer again, I imagine whatever direction we’ll choose, will be aligned across our different platforms.

[RonanCJ]

Count me as two people (myself and a friend) wanting the option to show absolute timestamps on Android. We're trying out Signal after the recent Facebook privacy change for WhatsApp, and the lack of absolute timestamps under messages is the main thing that Signal is missing.

From a user experience perspective, it's easier for people to understand "oh, this message was sent at 7:37 AM" than it is to understand "this message was sent 3 hours ago, which could be anything from 2 hours 30 minutes to 3 hours 29 minutes ago".

[khtan]

There will always be scenarios when a timestamp is more useful, and others when a relative time is more useful. Hopefully a way to set this per message or a default for the chat that can be overridden at the message level would be useful.
Thanks,

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

Have you tried hovering over the relative timestamp? Or looked at the message details screen?

Or, asking another way: do you always need the absolute timestamp, or is okay to get it on demand?

[khtan]

When I first reported the problem, hovering did not work for me. Now it does, and yes, that will help. The More Info is tedious and only shows one item and makes it difficult to compare times between two messages.
In any case, once the message is longer than a certain time ( a day? ), the relative time is dropped and the absolute time is displayed.

However, in many situations, a simple absolute time is easier to use. If I go for a jog and make 2 entries in the "Note To Self", say "Start run" and "End run" at the appropriate times, it is easier to just see the time 12:37 and 13:02 and do the difference directly instead of I started running 37 min ago, and I finished running 2 min ago. Worse if the event straddles these two formats - now I started at 12:37 and finished 3 min ago.

Finally, if you look at Whatsapp, you can see the simple time stamp that seems to work for most cases.

[RonanCJ]

I agree that absolute times are generally more useful for messaging apps than relative times (which is probably why most messagers use absolute time stamps). So, if it comes down to choosing which reference to display instead of creating a setting that users can choose by themselves, absolute times would be more helpful.

The hover feature is presumably useful on desktop clients, but on touch-based clients like Android and iOS, it is not helpful since there's no way to hover over a message without touching it.

[JojoJojoJoey]

I support this feature request too. If option is not given to a user, I would definitely prefer absolute time stamps.

[justynke]

Hey, this feature would be great. Please include it in the upcoming updates. It’s not only my opinion, but also of many friends of mine using signal. Thanks for the great work you doing!

[l0rb]

Add one more voice to this. Whenever a user actually cares about what time a message is from the absolute timestamp will nearly always be more useful. Humans are also much more used to estimating relative differences from timestamps than calculating timestamps from relative times.

If an option is not an option I believe absolute time is the better user experience.

[przemyslslaw]

Another request. Please just make the full timestamp the default and don't use the relative times. Coming from WhatsApp, the relative times feel like a clear downgrade. Pretty please!

[khtan]

There is no useful information when Signal shows events with time "Now". In fact, several "Now"s just shows Signal's resolution is too coarse. A simple timestamp is much more useful.
Also, it is a shame to see this feature request being closed without giving the user a chance to set the default to "Timestamp" instead of "Artificially smart time strings".

[RonanCJ]

I suggest adding your feedback to this thread on Signal Community. Whether the developers will respond to it is an open question, but it is at least the location that they have asked this discussion to take place in.

[ZMI-JohnSchmitz]

Add my voice to wanting the option. @l0rb makes a particularly good point. Also note that Slack is completely inconsistent currently:

Make an option for relative or absolute, and use whatever is chosen everywhere.