Category: Zone BBS Suggestions and Feedback
somewhere in your account settings, there should be a drop-down list of different timezone's. then all the times would display correctly in your timezone. i'm in london where we have gmt standard time. it would be nice if we didn't have to keep trying to work out the difference between eastern standard time (EST) and our preferred timezone. while it's great for people on here who are in EST, not all of us are.
oh and we could also add support for daylight saving time (DST).
what do you think?
Not that hard to do, seeing as all times are represented internally by PHP as epoch timestamps (numbers of milliseconds or seconds since the beginning of the Unix epoch, January 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC). We would simply have to calculate the offsets and then convert the result back to a human-readable time.
why can't you just ask someone what time zone they're in? that makes more sense
To be honest, I don't think this is a bad idea. It's pretty common for sites to have an option in users' profiles where they can select their time zone.
There's a way, using Javascript to figure out the user's time zone from the Internet settings on the user's computer. However I fail to see the usefulness of this feature, it's not often you need to figure out when something happened on this site and figuring out the difference between one's time zone and EST cannot be that mentally taxing. This way it's pretty clear when something ws posted since all times are quoted in absolute terms. Also daylight savings time rules are different and change over time, making it a bit tricky to adjust for daylight savings in different time zones, although this is a minor difficulty to overcome. It's perfectly doable, with or without user profile settings, but, again, I don't know if it'll be useful.
The system and system events will always be on eastern time. It'd be rather complicated to try to get the system to assign points and such according to evveryone's time zone. About all that I can see this being useful for is the boards, audio profiles, and grafiti.
:P Plus, the exercise of making you add and subtract is good for you.
the only reason i'd like to use it is to find out when some of my friends log in to the site. for example, if it says they last logged in at 5 a.m, it means nothing to me
Ouch, so you are the time keeper and you can't subtract the hours difference between your time zone and the EST one to figure out what 5am means to you?
A simple thing that can be done, for those who wish to figure it out, would be to implement a "/ time" command that would tell you the current system time of the web site. If you can't work it out from there, well, then may be a little basic addition and subtraction practice might be in order.
there is a /time command which gives the current server time, but it would be nice just to have the time converted in to our own timezone. other websites like this one have this type of feature so i don't see why it can't be implemented here.
There was already a post like this before and i believe someone who knew what they were doing said it wasn't worthit.
lol, I'm in eastern time anyway, and i've gotten really good at converting time zones considering how many systems like this I go on with people all over the word. If someone tells me they're on some other time zone, especially the Canada/US ones, i pretty much automatically know where they are. I guess it might be more difficult for someone in, say, australia, but in gmt it's not that hard, just subtract five hours. Come on, even i can do that, lol.