How to set time zone for forum? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Tom45
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2018, 06:49:32 pm
content: The time shown by the forum software is now 2 hours earlier than my local time. I think it was OK at one time. Looking through the options in my Profile settings, I can't find how to change it.So how do I change this?Posted at 11:49:25 PDT.Edit: forum says I posted it at 09:49:32

author: tsman
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2018, 06:58:01 pm
content: Go tohttps://www.eevblog.com/forum/profile/?area=themeThe orange Modify Profile button is actually a dropdown menu and there are multiple pages of settings.

author: Tom45
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2018, 07:02:10 pm
content: Quote from: tsman on July 07, 2018, 06:58:01 pmThanks. Found it under Look and Layout

author: Ian.M
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2018, 08:17:21 pm
content: Unfortunately the forum local time is set to Dave's local Australian timezone (for legacy reasons). This means that if daylight saving time in your timezone follows different rules to the forum timezone, you will get an offset of up to two hours (if you set the offset when one is on DST and the other isn't, that happens approx six months later).IMHO Dave and GNIF should bite the bullet and migrate the forum to UTC - but that could be problematic due to out of order post dates unless the forum is down for at least 12 hours during the migration.

author: Tom45
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2018, 03:50:45 am
content: Ian,I should have recognized the symptoms. Some years ago I had a couple of customers in New Zealand and I had to keep in mind the time difference of 3, 4, or 5 hours (plus 1 day) depending on the time of year before calling them.So if I want to keep the reported time in sync with my local time, I need to adjust it every time either country switches between standard and daylight time. Or switch the forum to UTC as you suggest.

author: Ian.M
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2018, 05:56:25 am
content: https://www.nsw.gov.au/about-new-south-wales/daylight-savings/Probably the easiest option is to set the offset to compensate for the base timezone difference (AEST is UTC +10H) then put up with it being an hour ahead during AEDT (Sidney DST) and an hour behind during your local DST.A proper fix would require server side intervention + a SMF mod to enable named timezone support. in user profiles.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2018, 11:30:42 am
content: Quote from: Ian.M on July 07, 2018, 08:17:21 pmAs a former admin of a forum that runs vBulletin (a fairly costly commercial forum server), this forum’s software sucks. vB’s paid support was worth its weight in gold, they’d even help us to create our own customizations. But above all it was reliable enough for the forum sysadmin to not fear things like Unicode and time zones. (Though to be honest, I am shocked that this forum was ever set up without those. By the time eevblog was created, Unicode and time zone support were absolutely normal things to be using. Nobody should have ever been setting up a server that didn’t default to those!!)That said, at least it’s not as bad as phpbb, which I use as a poster child of how the promises of open source software can fail to deliver in the real world...

author: Zucca
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 10, 2018, 08:05:12 am
content: Quote from: tooki on July 08, 2018, 11:30:42 amThanks for the Info. I imagine Dave and gnif knows what the limitations here are, and they accepted those ones. Personally I would pay out of my pocket for having more freedom/space in posting pics and uploading stuff.

author: IanMacdonald
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 11, 2018, 08:46:20 am
content: In this day and age it's enough of a problem knowing what time it is in other places. The you have DST to complicate matters. IMHO, DST should be done away with. It's an anachronism from the days when hardly anybody travelled outside of their own time zone, so the fact that their clock wasn't even showing the right time didn't matter. Basically, deliberately setting clockswrongis just plain stupid.