← All articles
Development Updated June 2026 · 6 min read

Using Discord Timestamps and Formatting in Your Bot

Why Unix Timestamps?

Instead of saying "Meeting at 5 PM EST," which forces European and Asian members to do mental math, Discord allows you to send a special markdown tag: <t:UNIX_TIMESTAMP:FORMAT>. Discord's client automatically converts this into the viewer's local timezone.

How to generate them

A discord timestamp generator is a simple tool (often a web app or a bot command) that converts a human-readable date into the required Unix epoch integer. The formatting flags include:

Implementing in your bot

When building your bot, you can programmatically generate these. In javascript: Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000) gives the current epoch. If you are building an event scheduling bot, utilizing the relative :R format creates a live countdown timer directly in the chat, dramatically increasing event attendance.

If you don't want to code this logic yourself, simply ask Forgely: "Create a command that takes a date and time, and posts a relative Discord timestamp countdown." The AI will wire the timestamp generation automatically.

\n