Once a community grows past one country, a quiet problem shows up. You ask a question, nobody answers, and you can't tell whether people are ignoring you or asleep. You schedule something for "8pm" and half the server shows up at the wrong time.
The frustrating part is that Discord almost solves this — and then stops one step short.
Why Discord can't answer this itself
Discord has excellent timestamp handling. Post a <t:...> timestamp and every reader sees it rendered in their own timezone, automatically, in their own language. It's genuinely one of the best things about the platform.
But look closely at what that gives you: it always answers "when is this, for me?"
It can never answer "what time is it, for them?"
That's the question you actually have before you ping someone. Is it mid-afternoon where they are, or three in the morning? Discord has no idea, because it never stores where anyone is. A server has a preferred_locale — that's a language, not a place — and nothing else. Guessing a timezone from a language would be accidentally right for German and pure invention for en-US, which spans six of them.
So somebody has to store it. That's the job of a Discord timezone bot.
Setting it: type what you'd say out loud
/timezone set
Then start typing. Nobody thinks of themselves as living in Europe/Berlin, so the suggestions understand what people actually type:
| You type | You get |
|---|---|
berlin | Europe/Berlin |
new york | America/New_York |
PST, CET, GMT | the matching zone |
germany, japan | the country's zone |
The full Region/City name works too, if you know it.
A note on honesty: the shortcut list is maintained, not complete. australia is deliberately missing, because Sydney and Perth are three hours apart and a guessed answer would be worse than none. Type australia and you'll get the actual Australian zones to pick from.
Reading it
/timezone show user:@alice
You get her local time — and, if you've both set a zone, how many hours ahead or behind you she is. That second half is the part that changes behaviour: "6 hours ahead of you" tells you instantly whether to wait or to leave a message.
The offset is worked out from the real UTC offsets at that moment, not from a lookup table. Daylight saving shifts zones against each other, and the changeover dates differ around the world — for about two weeks each spring, Berlin and New York are five hours apart instead of the usual six. A fixed table would quietly be wrong for those two weeks.
Set once, works everywhere
Here's the part a single-server bot structurally can't do.
Your timezone is a fact about you, not about a server. So CloudMod stores it per member across your whole network. Set it once, on any server you've connected, and every other one already knows.
If you run a main server plus a few community or game-specific ones, nobody has to set anything twice.
It pairs with going away
The same plugin covers /afk set, and the two answer neighbouring questions:
- Is she around? → the AFK status, with when she's back
- Is it even a reasonable hour there? → the timezone
Ping someone who's away and you get both in one line: their reason, when they're back, and what time it is where they are. Those two facts together are usually enough to decide whether to wait up.
What gets stored, and how to remove it
A timezone is roughly a location, so it's treated as personal data:
- Nothing is stored until a member runs
/timezone setthemselves. /timezone clearremoves it completely, at any time (the Away & Timezone docs list every command).- Turning the plugin off stops all of it.
A note on Alpha
Away & Timezone is an Alpha plugin — fully usable, just newer than our stable features. If something feels off, that feedback is what moves it to stable.