Calendar-Based Scheduled Messages on Discord (Weekly, Monthly, Cron)

A calendar schedule sends a message when the calendar says so — every Monday at 9:00, on the 1st and the 15th, on the last day of the month — instead of every N hours. Discord has no native way to do this; with MsgPlanner you build it visually from the dashboard, and a guided wizard picks the right setup for you if you’d rather answer two questions than think in recurrence rules.

Calendar schedules are created in the web dashboard (the in-app wizard covers one-time and recurring); once created, they can be suspended or deleted from Discord too.

Calendar or recurring? Pick the right tool

MsgPlanner has two repeating schedule types, and choosing well saves you headaches:

• Recurring repeats at a fixed distance: every 45 minutes, every 6 hours, every 3 days. The clock time can drift across months and DST — it’s the right tool for “every N”.
• Calendar fires at wall-clock times you choose: “Monday and Thursday at 18:30”, “the 1st of the month at 9:00”. It’s the right tool whenever you’d describe the plan with days and times rather than a distance.

Rule of thumb: if your sentence contains a weekday, a month day or a clock time, you want calendar.

What calendar schedules can express

All of these are a single calendar schedule in MsgPlanner:

• Weekly patterns — every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9:00;
• Multiple times a day — 9:00, 13:00 and 18:30, every day or only on chosen weekdays;
• Month days — the 1st and the 15th at 10:00; payday reminders on the 27th;
• The last day of the month — a real “last day” option, whether that is the 28th, 30th or 31st (no cron gymnastics needed);
• Time windows with intervals — every hour from 17:00 to 20:00, or every 5 minutes between minute 10 and minute 20 of specific hours;
• Cron under the hood — every calendar schedule is stored as a standard cron expression, and the runs panel always previews the next activations. Advanced expressions (say, from an edited export file) are preserved exactly as-is when you edit the schedule — you never have to write cron yourself.

Not sure? Let the wizard decide

The dashboard includes a small recurrence wizard: tell it what you’re trying to do — “a few precise times on some days”, “something every N minutes within a window” — and it proposes the exact setup, or honestly tells you when your plan needs two schedules instead of one. You can always tweak the result afterwards; nothing the wizard builds is locked.

Four real setups, problem → solution

“Event night is every Friday at 18:00 — every announcement should tell people when the next one is.” Calendar schedule → weekday Friday, time 18:00, your timezone. In the message: Game night starts now!{{visibleIfNext}} Next session {{nextRun:R}} — two tags the editor inserts for you. At delivery, {{nextRun}} expands to the following activation, rendered by Discord as a live countdown (“in 6 days”) in each reader’s own timezone; and on the very last delivery {{visibleIfNext}} trims everything after itself, so the final night never advertises a session that doesn’t exist.

“Payday post on the last day of the month, at 9:00.” Calendar schedule → month days → enable Last day of the month, time 9:00. February’s 28th, April’s 30th and July’s 31st are all handled by the same option — this is the case where raw cron makes people suffer, and here it’s a checkbox.

“Lobby announcements at 9:00, 13:00 and 18:30, but only on weekends.” One calendar schedule → weekdays Saturday + Sunday, three times added to the list. No need for three schedules: times and days combine.

“Keep the channel warm during prime time: one bump every hour, 17:00 to 20:00.” Calendar schedule → switch the time axis to interval mode → every 1 hour from 17:00 to 20:00. The summary shows exactly which activations that produces before you save.

“Every 6 hours, whatever the clock says.” That one is not a calendar — it’s a plain recurring schedule (every N). Rule of thumb from the top of this guide: distances → recurring, days and clock times → calendar.

Timezones and daylight saving time

Every calendar schedule runs in the IANA timezone you pick (say, Europe/Rome or America/New_York): “18:30” means 18:30 in that zone, year-round. Daylight saving is handled for you — when the clocks change, the message keeps firing at the same wall-clock time. Start and end dates define the window in which the calendar is active.

How to create one, step by step

1. Open the dashboard, create a schedule and choose Calendar.
2. Pick the destination — any text or announcement channel, a thread, or a forum post.
3. Write the message: full formatting, embeds, images, mentions, dynamic timestamps that always show the next run in each reader’s local time.
4. In the “When” panel choose your days (weekdays or month days), your times — or switch to interval mode for time windows.
5. Set start date, end date and timezone, check the preview of the **next five activations** — what you see there is exactly what will fire — and save.

Common mistakes (and how to dodge them)

• Right time, wrong timezone. “18:30” means 18:30 in the schedule’s timezone — not your PC’s. If deliveries land an hour off, check the zone on the schedule before touching the times.
• Forgetting the end date. Calendar and recurring schedules require one: it’s the fence that tells the bot when to stop. Want it to run “forever”? Set the end date far ahead — you can always extend it.
• Using recurring for wall-clock plans. “Every 24 hours” drifts when DST changes the clock; “every day at 9:00” as a calendar schedule never does. If the wall-clock time matters, calendar is the tool (recurring schedules also offer a DST-follow option, for the cases in between).
• The forum post doesn’t appear in the selector. It’s archived: Discord only lists active posts. Open it once and retry — details in our guide to forum and thread delivery.
• The reminder channel fills up with copies. A weekly reminder doesn’t need a scrollback of forty identical messages: turn on **auto-clean → keep only the latest**, and every delivery replaces the previous one — the channel always shows a single, current copy. (There’s also “delete after a delay”, from 1 minute to 30 days, for pings that should expire.)

FAQ