Time zone bot in Reddit has been up for some days now. The feedback has been very positive, people seem to love it. Of course there has been some negative feedback too. The bot isn't perfect so it sometimes posts irrelevant times or times that happen far in the future or in the past. The time zone bot is still being perfected and the feedback helps with this. Because the time zone bot seems to work great and only problems are with parsing the dates, we decided to create a similar bot to Discord too.
The Discord bot is called "Time Zone Bot" It's available to all servers and can be added by going to this link https://discordapp.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=323161971102973963&scope=bot and simply choosing the server you want it to and clicking "add". The bot is easy to use and works quite similar to the Reddit bot. You call it with dates and times with time zone info, it then converts this to how long until the time happens, like in Reddit, and responds "X days, Y hours and Z minutes until the ____ happens". It can also create countdowns similar to the Reddit bot.
You can always call the !help command to get information about commands and how to use them. I will explain the commands it supports at this moment. By calling !get followed by a time and time zone (you can add date too), the bot responds by telling you how many days, hours and minutes until the event happens. The date is optional, time and time zone is required. The date should be first, then time and last time zone. There is no required format for the input, only the order is important.
For example
"!get 12 PM PST"
then the bot responds: "6 hours and 20 minutes until 12 PM PST happens."
Calling !create followed by a date and time with time zone, the bot responds with a link to a countdown. Similarly to !get the date is optional but time and time zone required.
Example:
"!create June 13 12 AM PST"
bot: "Link to a live countdown https://countle.com/{id}"
Discord and Reddit are quite different platforms. Reddit is a public message board or forum, and Discord a real-time messaging and voice app. In Discord the user has to call the bot so the results are usually better. In Reddit people either really love time zone bot, or they really hate it. I understand that it's annoying if a bot posts some wrong time/date. In Discord this kind of problems won't arise as the user calls it and the bot either understands it or not but there is no so-called false positives. The Reddit and Discord bots are both needed and will stay around as long as the community feels so. The Reddit bot has now over 6000 comment karma spread over different subreddits. It has posted on 690 subreddits and in only 20 subreddits it has negative comment karma. If we overlook everything else we could say that 97% of subreddits have found the bot useful. Hopefully, the Discord bot will be received as well.
You can find more blog posts like this one from here: Blog If you would like to discuss this topic further or want to contact me, you can do so here: info@countle.com