Forum time zone

After fudging the forum and server time zones for a few years I’ve now rationalised them. So the server and forum are now set to run in UTC. That might mean that your profile time offset may be wrong.

If the post times on the forum seem wrong then go into your Profile in the Look & Layout (?) section and adjust the time offset until the posts show the correct time. You can try the ‘auto’ option but it sometimes gets it wrong.

The chances are that the times will never be right for everyone and that if you have DST in your area then you’ll probably have to adjust the offset (manually) when DST starts and ends, but at least the forum will be consistently on UTC now 8O

Just looked at it now and its spot on 17:35, thanks lol :slight_smile:

Sounds good!

Hi, just reset my time from 1 to 0 now showing ok.

teal

the auto detect worked for me :slight_smile:

That’s good to know. I think NZ time was one that didn’t work so well last time we played with this setting.

Sorry to be a pain, but I’ve looked for 15 minutes, and I don’t see the Look & Layout section?
Thanks.

Hit the “Profile” button on the menu bar at the top of the page, it has buttons starting “Home” “Bug Tracker” etc.

Then “Look and Layout” is one of the options on the left side of the profile page.

Duh, There it is! I had to restart the computer for the drop down menu to appear with a mouseover.
Auto detect works for me.
Thanks Niko.

UTC good, but can we have 24-hour clock? 04:49 PM doesn’t do a lot for me. . .

You can change that for yourself. Hit the Profile button and then Look and Layout, Time Format :slight_smile:

Great!

Having to remember to change your time zone twice a year for this forum seems a bit tedious and easy to forget to do or to remember if you did or didn’t do it. In other SMF forums on the web having the setting set to 0 for time zone works just fine automatically. Can this be revisited now that SMF has been updated since this issue first came up?

You can set the time zone to 0 if you wish so I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve?

The forum (and server) are now set to UTC which doesn’t have daylight saving time. Beyond that it’s difficult to see how a global forum can handle all the different the daylight saving change dates from around the world. The US and UK are both northern hemisphere, but change back and forwards on different dates. Europe currently has daylight savings but in 2021 that will probably stop. Southern hemisphere changes are on different dates again. Even within the US there’s no absolute consistency with Arizona not having DST. Some countries don’t have it at all.

I don’t know how other SMF forums achieve it if you’re seeing it work on them. They only have the same settings available as I do. Perhaps the other ones you use are in your own country and change when you change? That might work for you but they would then likely be wrong for people in other countries.

Well I’m not sure how it all works. But with wxforum.net I have it set to 0. And there all times posted match my time. I don’t think that wxforum happens to be set to my Eastern US time zone. I suppose that is possible but now I’m not sure.

On this forum if I set it to 0 then the time shown is UTC. I just thought that there was a way for the forum to automatically always detect what time zone I’m on and also reflect that synchronization to keep up with me.

I now have it set to -5 but in the Spring it probably won’t change to -4 as it didn’t change to -5 recently. I’ve just not seen this be a problem elsewhere where you have manually keep changing it every time. Strange that SMF doesn’t have a DST on/off setting so not sure why there is not a problem with this in wxforum.net.

Umm… WXForum.net does default to Eastern US timezone :slight_smile: AFAIK, this forum uses UTC as the default timezone.

Another problem is with WXSIM, although not serious. It doesn’t follow time changes automatically. However, on the opening screen for a forecast, there is a checkbox labelled DST and that corrects all the related proggies in one fell swoop (if you remember when the time changes #-o #-o )

Oh okay well that explains it. I’m on Eastern Time. I guess there is no automatic DST with SMF.