This is a small but ongoing annoyance - and Aha as a whole is great, very few annoyances. Our internal and external release dates are currently always the same. There are other requests about making the different internal/external dates optional, which would be one option, but just allowing you to check a box when you update the internal date to say "update external date to match" or some similar functionality so that you don't have to manually go and update two different dates to the same thing every time a date changes (which happens frequently) would remove this annoyance.
The original idea described in the description was shipped in 2015. There is a slightly different idea mentioned in the comments -- having the external date automatically round the internal release date. If you are interested in this, there is a related idea here.
Thanks for the quick reply Chris. I can see how that could be an issue for some users. However, in my case I would most likely making the external date more granular as we got closer to release. Extending your example: March 20th 2017 is Q1 2017 and if today (July 2016) I know it will slip to April 2, then showing Q2 2017 as the external date is completely reasonable. Then, maybe in Jan or Feb I change the granularity to Months instead of quarters since at that point I would hopefully be more confidant in the date.
So, in short, I would rather deal with occasional rounding wokyness to dealing with forgetting to change the external date and it just being wrong (and in most cases it would be showing a date that is earlier than planned). Plus, if the date is April 2, I certainly don't want the external date to show Q1.
Each time we think about modifying the external release date to work in the way you describe we struggle to see how it would be useful in practice. The problem is that automatically rounding may not reflect what you want to share externally. For example consider an external release date that is automatically rounded to the nearest quarter. When the internal release date is March 20th the external date will show Q1. If the internal release date changes to April 2nd the external date will show Q2. It seems that small changes in the internal date can cause big changes in the external date that would be undesirable.
The fix that was implemented does not resolve the issue in my case (and the case of others as I understand their requests). I want the external release date to be rounded to a less precise date range (e.g. quarter instead of exact date), but I want that rounded date to follow the internal date. I don't have different internal and external dates, I just don't want to show an exact day to "external" people.
Thanks for the good description of the problem. It made it clear to me how we can easily support this question. Currently we allow you to choose the resolution of your external dates. What we need to do is allow you to specify "Same as release date" as an option and then the two dates will follow each other.