Not in Daylight Savings Time now - change your profiles

[Jeff Johnson]

It's that time of year again. Daylight Savings Time ended three Sundays ago.
If your posts appear to be off by one hour, then you need to go into your own settings and change it.

Do this by:

1. Clicking on User Control Panel above
2. Selecting the Board Preferences tab
3. On the Edit global settings page, selecting No on the "Summer Time/DST is in effect:" setting.

That's it. The global setting on the board has changed, but users control their own setting for time zone and DST.

[Black Metal]

test

[bane]

that seems odd to me... I'm surprised the software doesn't take care of that automatically for you, it seems a simple-enough thing to automate...

[Car Knocker]

that seems odd to me... I'm surprised the software doesn't take care of that automatically for you, it seems a simple-enough thing to automate...

One thing to keep in mind: the start and end times of DST are variable, to a degree. Prior to 2007, DST started on the first Sunday of April and ended on the last Sunday of October. In 2007 that changed to the second Sunday in March through the first Sunday in November as part of one of the Energy Bills. Congress reserved the right to change back to the April-October schedule if it wishes.

[bane]

that seems odd to me... I'm surprised the software doesn't take care of that automatically for you, it seems a simple-enough thing to automate...

One thing to keep in mind: the start and end times of DST are variable, to a degree. Prior to 2007, DST started on the first Sunday of April and ended on the last Sunday of October. In 2007 that changed to the second Sunday in March through the first Sunday in November as part of one of the Energy Bills. Congress reserved the right to change back to the April-October schedule if it wishes.

True... but MS and *TONS* of other people are somehow able to configure their software products to keep track of DST changes without too much of a problem... since this software is designed to run on the internet it's a given that the server will have near-constant access to the internet... and thus, to the software-providers own server that can sync any DST changes up with each of their clients every month or so.

[Shaolin]

Another test.

[Jeff Johnson]

Bump.

Happens every time.

[divegeek]

that seems odd to me... I'm surprised the software doesn't take care of that automatically for you, it seems a simple-enough thing to automate...

One thing to keep in mind: the start and end times of DST are variable, to a degree.

Meh. LOTS of software deals with this just fine. Updates have to be pushed to address security problems anyway, so DST updates just ride the same channel.

For that matter, PHP's 'date()' function provides DST-compliant date formatting for any timezone you want to specify. In reality, the implementation of PHP's 'date()' just passes the question on to the underlying C library implementation, which just passes it on to the underlying operating system, which is pretty much always either some Unix'ish OS or Windows. All of them get it right, always, even when it changes.

I agree that it's very odd this is an issue.

[manithree]

that seems odd to me... I'm surprised the software doesn't take care of that automatically for you, it seems a simple-enough thing to automate...

One thing to keep in mind: the start and end times of DST are variable, to a degree.

Meh. LOTS of software deals with this just fine. Updates have to be pushed to address security problems anyway, so DST updates just ride the same channel.

For that matter, PHP's 'date()' function provides DST-compliant date formatting for any timezone you want to specify. In reality, the implementation of PHP's 'date()' just passes the question on to the underlying C library implementation, which just passes it on to the underlying operating system, which is pretty much always either some Unix'ish OS or Windows. All of them get it right, always, even when it changes.

I agree that it's very odd this is an issue.

I could be wrong, but isn't this a feature so that bbs systems with geographically distributed users let each user see everything in their local time? It does seem like a mis-feature for a state-specific board where most of us are in the same time zone, but the underlying OS defaults to its locale's set of time zone rules. It seems a lot easier to just ask 2 questions of each user (time zone, daylight/standard) than to get their zip code or location, match that to a the tzdata and use the correct rules for the user's locale. But it has been years since I used any of those system calls, and then I didn't do much.

[divegeek]

LOTS of software deals with this just fine. Updates have to be pushed to address security problems anyway, so DST updates just ride the same channel.

For that matter, PHP's 'date()' function provides DST-compliant date formatting for any timezone you want to specify. In reality, the implementation of PHP's 'date()' just passes the question on to the underlying C library implementation, which just passes it on to the underlying operating system, which is pretty much always either some Unix'ish OS or Windows. All of them get it right, always, even when it changes.

I agree that it's very odd this is an issue.

I could be wrong, but isn't this a feature so that bbs systems with geographically distributed users let each user see everything in their local time? It does seem like a mis-feature for a state-specific board where most of us are in the same time zone, but the underlying OS defaults to its locale's set of time zone rules. It seems a lot easier to just ask 2 questions of each user (time zone, daylight/standard) than to get their zip code or location, match that to a the tzdata and use the correct rules for the user's locale. But it has been years since I used any of those system calls, and then I didn't do much.

But the right way to do that, and the way most everyone does it, is to ask each user for their time zone, and whether or not their location does DST. Actually, most of the time this is one question, because the list of time zones includes separate entries for areas that do and don't do daylight savings.

Then you just ask the system to give you each date/time in the user-specified zone, including DST or no DST. The system knows when DST starts and ends in each area and just gives you the right answer. Users don't have to manually enable or disable the DST adjustment, it's automagic.

[divegeek]

Jeff: Do you have access to the source code this site runs? I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I have written a fair amount of PHP. It probably wouldn't be too hard to find and fix the date calculation to make DST adjustment automatic.

[GeneticsDave]

Jeff: Do you have access to the source code this site runs? I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I have written a fair amount of PHP. It probably wouldn't be too hard to find and fix the date calculation to make DST adjustment automatic.

Oh please yes... having all the users change their clock twice a year seems awfully inefficient. Somethings I absolutely love about phpBB, but there are so many common sense things that aren't built in that make you say "What the???"

[Jeff Johnson]

I'll see if there is a ready-made php mod available for this.

Hmmm. Looks like there is one that will probably work. I'll see when I can get some time to apply it.

[arichens]

Am I misunderstanding? We are still on DST, per time.gov.

Or is this just preparation for the change?

[Jeff Johnson]

Bump. Again.

No, I haven't installed any patch to calculate this automatically.