Timestamp on bridge base forum postings

[RMB1]

1. Is this right forum for posts about forum software/infrastructure?

 

2. The footer of this page shows my time as 02:47 (correct) but my post appears as an hour earlier - ignoring UK daylight saving? This is now not happening! But posts to ACBL Cpnvention Charts topic were showing as 01:xx when they were posted at 02:xx.

 

3. Posts can often appear to be posted a few minutes in the future - when this happens they are not marked as "read" when I read them. They are only marked as "read" once the time of the posting is in the past.

Edited April 1, 2013 by RMB1

[aguahombre]

Dunno if this is the right forum, but it can't hurt. We mentioned it on other fora, so maybe some of our spam will get through if we try enough places :unsure:

[Vampyr]

We mentioned it on other fora,

 

The site we are posting on is called "BBO Discussion Forums". Perhaps we could combine a discussion of this issue with the one about which verb form to use with "logistics" :P

[aguahombre]

The logistics thing was because the thread was losing its allure. I am not a stickler, or even a wannabe expert on grammar.

[barmar]

The clock on one of the webservers was several minutes fast because its NTP daemon had stopped running. I've restarted it and it's back in sync now.

[barmar]

2. The footer of this page shows my time as 02:47 (correct) but my post appears as an hour earlier - ignoring UK daylight saving? This is now not happening! But posts to ACBL Cpnvention Charts topic were showing as 01:xx when they were posted at 02:xx.

Do you have "DST Correction" checked in your forum settings?

[mycroft]

Like barmar, I wonder if the forum's being LeftPondianCentric again. It's DST over here (except for Arizona and Saskatchewan and Creston, BC(*)) but not in Rest Of World yet - but that doesn't mean that the forum may not think so.

 

(*) Technically, Creston *is* on DST - Mountain Daylight Time. Come November, they'll go back onto Pacific Standard Time. They have a "Time Zone Change" sign that, twice a year, gets moved from one side of the city to the other.

[barmar]

The DST check is done using Javascript in the browser. Javascript doesn't have a built-in method to tell whether you're currently in DST, so it uses a popular trick. There's a function that tells you what the local difference from GMT was or will be on any specified date (for future dates, this of course assumes no unexpected changes to DST laws). So it gets the offset on January 1 and July 1, and the current offset. If the current offset is the same as July, DST is in effect; if it's the same as January, standard time is in effect. So if your computer has the timezone set correctly, and knows when to switch in and out of DST automatically, the forum should pick this up if you enable the DST correction option.

 

This gets things backwards for the southern hemisphere, though. Someone reported a problem from Australia last year, and I sent it to the vendor. I don't know if they've fixed it in newer releases (the only fixes they make to our version are for security problems).