Standardizing timezone names

April 19, 2005 6:36 PM

"EST" = "Eastern Standard Time"; "EDT" = "Eastern Daylight saving Time"; "ET" = "Eastern Time" (no standard/daylight specified -- usually obvious which it is). It's to be expected that people will make these mistakes in FPPs and comments, but could you tweak the code so it doesn't say "EST" when it really doesn't mean "EST"? Rather than trying to come up with some code algorithm, or trying to remember to make the DST change every six months, just call it ET / CT / PT / etc and be done with it. A pet peeve of mine ...
posted by intermod to Bugs at 6:36 PM (18 comments total)

So, it's off an hour one way or the other . . .

It was as if a dime cried out in agony, and then was suddenly silenced, by the pressure of the buttocks clenching down upon it . . .
posted by yhbc at 8:25 PM on April 19, 2005

yhbc...wtf? hehe.
posted by schyler523 at 9:48 PM on April 19, 2005

I think this is a new milestone in MeTa nit-pickery.
posted by goatdog at 9:48 PM on April 19, 2005

If we're going to be picky, I'd just vote for getting rid of the whole dang naming system for time zones on MeFi. Because the code uses Daylight Savings time, I now get to see timestamps in the grey which don't match my local time in PDT (even though I don't live in the US), and timestamps in the blue in ACST (?), which DO match my local time, even though ACST is actually an hour off of my local JST.

Still, I'm at peace with it (though I'm hoping that the MeFi redesign might take care of it). Just being picky to give goatdog a little fodder.
posted by Bugbread at 11:50 PM on April 19, 2005

Could we have CEST? :)
I'm joking.
posted by dabitch at 12:19 AM on April 20, 2005

What about our Mefite friends in Indiana and most of Arizona? It's important for them to know whether a time is DST or not, so that they know how many hours to tweak it.
posted by Plutor at 2:58 AM on April 20, 2005

I think this is a new milestone in MeTa nit-pickery.

Really? Wanting to get the time right is nit-picking? If the correct time isn't important then why time stamp at all? I'd say it was pretty fundamental.
posted by nthdegx at 4:32 AM on April 20, 2005

It just always says PST for me. Even though I have it set to UTC+0 (should be UTC+1 right now).

The way I figure out the time of a previous comment is to post another one and then subtract.
posted by grouse at 4:48 AM on April 20, 2005

ET phone home!
posted by breezeway at 8:35 AM on April 20, 2005

I live in Central Standard Time all year round, since I live in a province where we reject Daylight Savings just to be special. (There are seriously folks who worry it might confuse the cows. As if the cows care what time the clock says.)

Point being? It is unfortunate that there's no way to opt out of Daylight Savings. We don't all live on Daylight Savings.
posted by raedyn at 9:33 AM on April 20, 2005

You fools, with your linear time. All right-thinking people know that time is cubic. Cubic, I say!
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:27 AM on April 20, 2005

The super lazy solution is to change them to relative times, like Flickr's messageboards do. "1 day, 14 mins ago", instead of April 19th at 1:20 PM EST.
posted by smackfu at 10:35 AM on April 20, 2005

I've always wondered - what does it add to know what time a post was made? I might be missing something but I just can't grok why I should care about the timestamp at all. Can someone educate me?
posted by tristeza at 10:45 AM on April 20, 2005

You know, I know the PST/PDT thing has come up before, but ... isn't there a value in the date function in CFMX that will tell you wether or not it's savings time, and let you do the math on it? That's how I do things, but I'm one of those evil PHP & Linux programmers.
posted by SpecialK at 12:50 PM on April 20, 2005

I think this is a new milestone in MeTa nit-pickery.

If I weren't so lazy, I'd browse through the MeTa archives and find all of the posts that are nitpickier than this one. I bet there'd be many. Which is not to say that I disagree with your assessment of this particular post as nitpicky; it's just that I've found around here that saying that one post or another is the most [whatever] ever is hardly ever accurate.
posted by anapestic at 2:25 PM on April 20, 2005

What's wrong with GMT? You know -- for those few of us who aren't actually _in_ the USA ;)
posted by coriolisdave at 7:10 PM on April 20, 2005

What about our Mefite friends in Indiana and most of Arizona? It's important for them to know whether a time is DST or not, so that they know how many hours to tweak it.

speaking as one of those people, i have to say that no, it's not important at all.
posted by jimmy at 9:11 PM on April 20, 2005

coriolisdave : "What's wrong with GMT?"

It's imperialistic and archaic. Down with GMT, long live UTC!
posted by Bugbread at 6:27 AM on April 21, 2005