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MSC3767: Time based notification filtering

Do not disturb / focus features are becoming standard across operating systems and networking products. Users expect to be able to manage the level of noisiness from an application based on day and time.

Users should be able to configure many periods of notification levels during the day; for example before work, lunch hour, and after work. They should also be able to schedule notification levels for a particular day of the week; for example a quieter notification setting all day on No Meeting Wednesday, or complete silence over the weekend.

Proposal

We introduce a push notification condition time_and_day to filter based on time of day and day of week.

time_and_day condition definition

key	type	value	description	Required
`kind`	string	'dnd_time_of_day'		Required
`timezone`	string	user's Olson formatted timezone	The timezone to use for time comparison. This format allows for automatic DST handling	Optional. Defaults to UTC
`intervals`	array	array of time matching intervals (see below)	Intervals representing time periods in which the rule should match. Evaluated with an OR condition	Required

Time matching interval definition

key	type	value	description	Required
`time_of_day`	string[]	tuple of `hh:mm` time	Tuple representing start and end of a time interval in which the rule should match. Times are ISO 8601 formatted times. Times are inclusive	Optional. When omitted all times are matched.
`day_of_week`	number[]	array of integers 0-7	An array of integers representing days of the week on which the rule should match, where 0 = Sunday, 1 = Monday, 7 = Sunday	Required

time_of_day condition is met when the server's timezone-adjusted time is between the values of the tuple, or when no time_of_day is set on the interval. Values are inclusive.
day_of_week condition is met when the server's timezone-adjusted day is included in the array.

When both time_of_day and day_of_week conditions are met for an interval in the intervals array the rule evaluates to true.

{
    "kind": "time_and_day",
    "timezone": "Europe/Berlin",
    "intervals": [
        {
            "time_of_day": ["00:00", "09:00"],
            "day_of_week": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] // Monday - Fri
        },
        {
            "time_of_day": ["17:00", "23:59"],
            "day_of_week": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] // Monday - Fri
        },
        {
            // no time_of_day, all day is matched
            "day_of_week": [6, 7] // Weekend
        }
},

A primary usecase for this condition is creating 'do not disturb' behaviour. For example, Wednesday morning focus time rule:

{
    "rule_id": ".m.rule.master",
    "default": true,
    "enabled": true,
    "conditions": [
        "kind": "time_and_day",
        "timezone": "Europe/Berlin",
        "intervals": [
            {
                "time_of_day": ["09:00", "11:00"],
                "day_of_week": [3] // Wednesday
            },
    ],
    "actions": [
        "dont_notify" // See note below
    ]
}

`dont_notify` and Do Not Disturb behaviour

dont_notify will stop badges from being updated in the client during 'do not disturb' hours, so the user will not be able to locate messages that were silenced when they are back online. To silence push notifications but allow discovery of missed messages in app, notify_in_app as proposed in MSC3768 should be used.

Potential issues

If a user changes timezone their push rules will not automatically update.

Alternatives

System

Some systems (e.g. iOS) have their own DND / focus mode but this is only an option if all of your devices are within that vendor ecosystem (here Apple) and doesn't help when you have e.g. an iPad and an Android phone. This also needs to be configured per device.

`room_member_count` style comparison

"conditions": [
        {
            "kind": "time_of_day",
            "is": ">=18000000" // 17:00 NZST, 5:00 UTC 
        },
        {
            "kind": "time_of_day",
            "is": "<=75600000" // 9:00 NZST, 21:00 UTC
        },
        
    ]

As only one rule per kind + rule_id is allowed and rule conditions are an AND this allows only one contiguous range to be defined. This precludes one of the main usecases for the feature - ignoring notifications outside of work/waking hours.

Device assessment

An alternative version of the time_and_day defined above used timezone agnostic times and did not define a timezone. This rule would be assessed only on the device. This is not easily achieved on every platform.

ms offsets for time intervals

Previous proposals used ms offsets to represent time of day instead of hh:mm. Ms offsets may behave incorrectly on days with a DST jump and are less intuitive.

Security considerations

Stores user's timezone on the server. DND periods saved to the server without timezone information would reveal information about a user's approximate timezone anyway. Users who do not wish to store their timezone can set DND periods in UTC (this option should be available in clients implementing time based notification filtering).

Unstable prefix

While this MSC is not considered stable time_and_day should be referred to as org.matrix.msc3767.time_and_day

Dependencies

None.

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