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ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

community.openai.com

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Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#111

Post by soulofmischief »

randyrand wrote: post #71
soulofmischief wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extensions can steal data. https://www.pcmag.com/news/uninstall-now-these-chrome-browse... It's irresponsible for OpenAI to let this issue be solved by extensions.

Not if you actually read what the extension does and drag and drop it into chrome yourself. Don't install from the web store. Those ones can auto-update.

Your suggestion is to not use the platform as intended, and to understand the source code of the extension. That advice is not actionable by non-technical people and does not help mitigate mass surveillance.

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#112

Post by zbycz »

caminanteblanco wrote: post #107
zbycz wrote: post #57

If you download a Data export, the timestamps are there for every conversation, and often for messages as well. The html file is just a big JSON with some JS rendering, so I wrote this bash script which adds the timestamp before the conversation title: sed -i 's|" " + conversation.title + " "|" " + new Date(conversation.create_time*1000).toISOString().slice(0, 10) + " @ " + conversation.title + " "|' chat.html

Do you know if this is available in the actual web interface, and just not displayed, or is it just in the data export? If it is in the web, maybe a browser extension would be worth making.

I checked, and yes - the field "create_time" is available both for coversation and for each message. The payload looks the same as the exported JSON.

Look for this API call in Dev Tools: https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/conversation/

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#113

Post by drdaeman »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #7
Valid3840 wrote: post #2

ChatGPT still does not display per-message timestamps (time of day / date) in conversations. This has been requested consistently since early 2023 on the OpenAI community forum, with hundreds of comments and upvotes and deleted threads, yet remains unimplemented. Do any of you could think of a reason (UX-wise) for it not to be displayed?

Regular people hate numbers. Not a joke. To capture a wide audience you want to avoid numbers, among other technical niceties.

I’m sorry but this really sounds like a made-up idea. Is there any actual repeatable research that could back this claim?

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#114

Post by subscribed »

Y_Y wrote: post #25
smelendez wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it a toggle then, like a lot of popular chat apps?

There's only one thing they hate more than numbers...

Not knowing there are toggles inside settings they don't even know eziatt.

Yeah, we know. This is why there are defaults and only defaults.

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#116

Post by subscribed »

serf wrote: post #44
malfist wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What purpose does logging your lifting with chatgpt achieve?

presumably the same thing that logging anything with an LLM achieves : plain language into structured text quickly.

Seriously, there are AI-supported apps for this. Much better than the barebones, subpar web chat.

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#117

Post by madeofpalk »

observationist wrote: post #85
madeofpalk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it just simpler to believe that ChatGPT doesn't have timestamps because... they never added them? It wasn't in the original MVP prototype and they've just never gotten around to it? Surely there's enough people working in product development here to recognise this pattern of never getting around to fixing low-hanging fruit in a product.

They exist in the exported data. It'd require a weekend's worth of effort to roll out a new feature that gives users a toggle to turn timestamps off and on. It's trivial, but we will never see it. The people in charge of UX/UI don't care about what users say they want, they all know better.

There’s a very long list of “weekends’s worth of effort” jobs that exist in our product that’ll probably never get done because of just the general distinctions of product development instead of some conspiracy by Big Designer.

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#118

Post by jiggawatts »

stainablesteel wrote: post #38
mv4 wrote: post #33

Other than the potential liability, cost may also be a factor. Back in April 2025, Altman mentioned people saying "thank you" was adding “tens of millions of dollars” to their infra costs. Wondering if adding per-message timestamps would cost even more.

this is actually hilarious, also easily fixable if they just respond to that with a pre-determined if response == 'thank you': print('your welcome')

That won't work if the previous conversation was something like "translate everything from here on into ".

Re: ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests

#119

Post by gnyman »

zbycz wrote: post #57

If you download a Data export, the timestamps are there for every conversation, and often for messages as well. The html file is just a big JSON with some JS rendering, so I wrote this bash script which adds the timestamp before the conversation title: sed -i 's|" " + conversation.title + " "|" " + new Date(conversation.create_time*1000).toISOString().slice(0, 10) + " @ " + conversation.title + " "|' chat.html

This is a bit of sidetrack, but in case someone is interested in reading their history more easily. My conversations.html export file was ~200 MiB and I wanted something easier to work with, so I've been working on a project to index and make it searchable.

It uses the pagefind project so it can be hosted on a static host, and I made a fork of pagefind which encrypts the indexes so you can host your private chats wherever and it will be encrypted at rest and decrypted client-side in the browser.

(You still have to trust the server as the html itself can be modified, but at least your data is encrypted at rest.)

One of the goals is to allow me to delete all my data from chatgpt and claude regularly while still having a private searchable history.

It's early but the basics work, and it can handle both chatgpt and claude (which is another benefit as I don't always remember where I had something).

https://github.com/gnyman/llm-history-search

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