Time Zone Problem

April 4, 2006 12:12 AM

Why is the time wrong, as I view it? Sitting here on the Australian east coast, it's 5:10 pm, or UTC + 10, which is how my preferences are set. So what's the Metafilter setting, where's it gone wrong?
posted by wilful to bugs at 12:12 AM (12 comments total)

My time (wellington NZ UTC + 12) is 1 hour out, I guess due to not adjusting for the daylight savings we had 1 month ago.
posted by scodger at 12:25 AM on April 4, 2006

Yeah, I'm in Sydney and I'm on UTC+9 (Japan Time) to make it right.
posted by tellurian at 12:35 AM on April 4, 2006

Well technically it only suggests places and what you're actually choosing on the preferences page is offsets to UTC. So it's not supposed to adjust based on daylight savings.

(well except when daylight savings affect UTC... if that happens?)
posted by holloway at 1:26 AM on April 4, 2006

Normally, UTC is universal and doesn't change with the seasons.

One Metafilter, "UTC" changes when America switches to DST, which doesn't work well if you're in the southern hemisphere or a country that doesn't do DST (or does it on different dates).
posted by cillit bang at 2:03 AM on April 4, 2006

I still don't understand, so what should I choose? I'm obviously not in Japan but it works for me. I had to disable all of my automagically updated networked machines at work when it changed daylights saving because of the Commonwealth Games by one week (what happened there, I'm still not sure why it was necessary)?
posted by tellurian at 6:47 AM on April 4, 2006

Just change the offset until it shows the right time for you. You'll have to change it again when your country or America switches DST on or off.
posted by cillit bang at 6:52 AM on April 4, 2006

Can you imagine one day in the future when you on your computer can communicate and synchronise with another person and their computer and it will be clear to both of you via your computers what time it is?
posted by tellurian at 8:07 AM on April 4, 2006

without America switches DST on or off.
posted by tellurian at 8:08 AM on April 4, 2006

One solution would be for the time zone drop-down to just say "pick what time it is". And then list all the offsets.
posted by smackfu at 8:31 AM on April 4, 2006

I put in hours off GMT and called it "timezones" here but the server does go through savings time and shift twice a year, but it would be a nightmare to keep track of all the timezone shifts per country and per section of country, and the date they switch back and forth (including those that don't switch).

Timezones are a bitch, and what you see is a ugly hack that works for most users.
posted by mathowie at 9:02 AM on April 4, 2006

out of curiousity, has anyone ever capitalized on the time-shift present in the yearly end-of-DST 1-2am do-over? How does the site deal with that?
posted by cortex at 9:26 AM on April 4, 2006

out of curiousity, has anyone ever capitalized on the time-shift present in the yearly end-of-DST 1-2am do-over?

Every year when I'm in a bar with a 2:30AM last call.
posted by dersins at 9:38 AM on April 4, 2006