what timezone does WP use?

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just a random question. it kind of confuses me when my post says i posted it tomorow.

You can set your own time zone by going to My Account and going to Edit Profile and it will say GMT which stands for UK time and I selected GMT-8 Hours because I am eight hours behind them.


When I am not logged in, everything is three hours ahead so it's set at Eastern Time.

For added confusion WP doesn't handle changes to sumertime etc correctly because it always follows when the Americans change their clocks which isn't at the same time as everyone else on the planet so it messes up everyone else's time for a few weeks. So you have to set you time zone wrong by an hour into the future or past to show the correct time. then change it back again. Hope you followed that

thank i do that too

WP time is set to US EST/EDT (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Time_Zone).

The settings in your profile are not relative to GMT (and GMT is not the UK time zone - currently the UK is on BST).

The setting in your profile are relative to US Eastern Time Zone plus five hours, whatever that happens to be.

The settings, though, say that they are relative to GMT, not that they are relative to GMT part of the year, and relative to GMT +1 when the U.S. uses daylight savings time.

Short version: If you are in the U.S. and use daylight savings time, set it so that the time difference with GMT matches what it is in the winter. If you aren't in the U.S., or are in Arizona or Hawaii, your time settings will be off by an hour part of the year unless you change them at the appropriate times of the year. If the times are off by more than an hour, then you should change your settings. US. Eastern is -5, Central -6, etc.

... not forgetting the Navajo Nation...

... and it seems that the transitions between standard and daylight savings times across the US are all done at 2am, local time - hence everywhere in the US that does use DST, except the East, will go out by one hour for one, two, three, four or five hours, twice a year. (Countries in Europe actually go for a simultaneous transition at 1:00 UTC - which works reasonably well.)

Spare a thought for members in India, say, who do not use DST, and have IST as UTC+05:30 - which means they probably settle for showing all times a half hour wrong, and ignore the fact that it switches between plus and minus a half hour when the East coast jumps.

I'm quite surprised really that the forum doesn't cater for the various daylight saving regimes across the world, unless it is because it is using old software?

The sensible / obvious thing to me is that after people have selected their time zone (mine is simply GMT + 1 hour), that there should be a list of rules in code to make the relevant adjustments to the times shown. Such a list of rules wouldn't be particularly long and it would be fairly static too - nations don't tend to change their daylight saving rules very often. Am I missing something? Is it more complex than this?

Most forums I've been on don't have any adjustment for daylight savings time (DST).

And it's not as simple as coding for daylight savings time for each time zone. One time zone could have northern hemisphere DST, southern hemisphere DST, and no DST. That in addition to differences of a few weeks in when DST starts, which can exist within one time zone. It's not as simple as one rule for each time zone.

There is no need for a board to maintain anything itself. The library routines all exist and utilise the well-maintained http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

The whole game is NOT as simple as you might think, since a full UTC date/time really needs to be converted according to the rules in force AT THAT POINT in the history of the desired time zone. The TZ Database does this correctly, back to 1970.

There is no real excuse for phpBB2 to have restricted users to entering only whole hour UTC offsets. That just seems to show that they didn't bother to find out how time zones work.

Some other board software does at least allow users to set a flag for "On daylight Saving Time", which is a little clearer than having to edit a time zone offset number.