ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests (community.openai.com)

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?

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It's ugly, why it isn't at least exposed as an option to enable for power users would make me look at some advantage time stamps would give to an inference scraper or possibly their service APIs don't have contemporaneous access to the metadata available from the web interface.

Surprised that people still use chatgpt

You can see a chat timestamp when it shows up as a search result.

I’m not suggesting this is sufficient, I’m just noting there is somewhere in the user interface that it is displayed.

Surely an intern over there can prompt a toggle/hover event

Just a note to those adding the time to the personalization response. It’s inaccurate. If you have an existing chat, the time is near the last time you had that chat session active. If you open a new one, it can be off by + or - 15 minutes for some reason

What annoys me even more is that ChatGPT doesn't alert you, when you near the context window limit. I have a chat which I've worked on for a year and now hit the context window. I've worked around this by doing a GDPR download of all messages, re-constructed the conversation inside a markdown file and then gave that file to claude to create a summarized / compacted version of that chat...

Just like on a piece of hardware that doesn't have a RTC, we rely on NTP. Maybe we just need an NTP MCP for the agents. Looks like there are several open-source projects already but I'm not linking to them because I don't know their quality or trust.

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.

I built a single page website that copies the current time to my clipboard and I paste it into my messages. It's inconvenient and I don't do it irregularly.

I'll have to look into the extension described in the link. Thank you for sharing. It's nice to know it's a shared problem.

I have had enough of this Evil AI. Never again.

may as well make a model stamp too, to remember which one was responding

You only need that info if you know you need it in your rag. Over the last two years of usage I don't recall where I'd need those timestamps but I know there are cases. Still, this would have to be an option because otherwise it would be waste of tokens. However, we have to consider they are competing for the quality AND length of the response even if a shorter response is better. There's a pretzel of considerations when talking about this.

Is it possible they're reusing responses which are close enough by some factor? Maybe this is why exposing a timestamp won't be beneficial for them.

New startup idea: ChatGPT but with timestamps. $100M series A

They also don’t support code formatting of inputs. You’d think after 3 years out whatever theyd have resolved that.

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|"<h4>" + conversation.title + "</h4>"|"<h4>" + new Date(conversation.create_time*1000).toISOString().slice(0, 10) + " @ " + conversation.title + "</h4>"|' chat.html

Beyond the lack of timestamps, ChatGPT produces oddly formatted text when you copy answers. It’s neither proper markdown nor rich text. The formatting is consistently off: excessive newlines between paragraphs, strangely indented lists, and no markdown support whatsoever.

I regularly use multiple LLM services including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, among others. ChatGPT’s output has the most unusual formatting of them all. I’ve resorted to passing answers through another LLM just to get proper formatting.

Time stamps? lol They still don’t have the option to search your previous history. Luckily I built an extension that stores all chats locally to a database so I can reference and view offline if I want too. Time stamps included.

The only (silly) reason I can think of is that a non trivial number of people copy pasta directly from chatgpt responses and having the timestamp there would be annoying.

I would also love to see a token budget use for the chats -- to know when the model is about to run out of context. It's crazy this is not there.

The bonkers thing is you can't easily print the chats or export them as PDF.