Daylight saving comment problem

October 30, 2005 1:54 AM

MarshallBrain's comment on this thread keeps sinking to the bottom despite there being latter posts.
posted by ori to Bugs at 1:54 AM (9 comments total)

i.e. it's showing up as the last comment even though it isn't. Tried this in Firefox on two platforms.
posted by ori at 1:55 AM on October 30, 2005

It looks like the last comment by post time to me, perhaps this is a timezone issue? Wintertime just started in europe. What's yours?
posted by fvw at 1:59 AM on October 30, 2005

It's very odd: these three comments, which are listed before MarshallBrain's comment in the thread, are quite clearly responses to it. I would assume that this has something to do with the end of daylight savings time / summer time.

But it's damn weird, anyway.
posted by dersins at 2:28 AM on October 30, 2005

My vote goes for daylight savings time as well. His post shows up as 1:56, so anything posted 4 minutes later would be posted at 1am. So a whole hour of things being out of whack.

Interesting; never thought about the implications of this on a board if responses are sorted by the timestamp rather than them somehow knowing the order posted.
posted by Stunt at 2:37 AM on October 30, 2005

This is why you should always store time as UTC internally, converting to and from for input and output.
posted by fvw at 2:38 AM on October 30, 2005

... or why you should use a database that supports timezone information on timestamp columns.
posted by sbutler at 9:58 AM on October 30, 2005

Now lets figure out how to exploit this.

1. Screw with DST on MeFi.
2. ???
3. Profit!
posted by mystyk at 9:59 AM on October 30, 2005

dee sss tee, schmee sss tee.... Clearly, MarshallBrain is my sock puppet and I've been melting sugar on the minutes hand again. It disappoints me that no-one has figured it out by now. This metafilter is so far removed from Kaycee Nicole's metafilter, it's not even funny.
posted by If I Had An Anus at 12:39 PM on October 30, 2005

fvw : "This is why you should always store time as UTC internally, converting to and from for input and output."

Yes. This would also spare me the effort of lying to Metafilter all summer and telling it I've moved to China, because Mefi decides that when the server goes daylight savings time, the whole world goes daylight savings time.
posted by Bugbread at 1:38 PM on October 31, 2005