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Time offset in profile

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Weaver:
I just noticed that the forum website was displaying a ‘current time is x’ value which was 1 hour less than the truth. I went into my profile and dug around, and saw it was explicitly set to -1 hour (auto). Perhaps this was something daft that I did some while ago given that all my machines work on permanent UTC / GMT, and I never go near BST summer time.

burakkucat:

--- Quote from: Weaver on December 25, 2018, 09:02:44 AM ---Perhaps this was something daft that I did some while ago given that all my machines work on permanent UTC / GMT, and I never go near BST summer time.

--- End quote ---

That is probably the correct reason. Like you, all my systems' RTCs are configured as GMT.  :)

Weaver:
I seem to recall that there have been problems in the distant past because poor fools with IBM PCs in the 1980s had hardware clocks set to BST, with variations for summer time. This was presumably because no one, IBM/Microsoft being particularly guilty, specified the correct standard for setting the time value in the clock. I think I read somewhere about how Microsoft operating systems used to muck about with the hardware clock, poking adjusted values into it when the hour changes. This would of course all go wrong if the system was down or another o/s was in control over the point in time when the clock changed. I think I have remembered rightly, but apologies if not. But just over ten years ago, again, if memory serves, Microsoft had an attack of sanity and added support in Win NT family o/s for systems where the hardware clock was optionally always set to UTC, with no stupid changes being applied to it, and so no chance of the system time going wrong twice a year. I set my PCs up to have UTC hardware clocks and with NT set up accordingly.

Returning to topic [hallelujah] is the Kitz web server set to UTC/GMT ? Wondering what the offsets mentioned in the per-user profile settings are relative to?

If the webserver is using ‘relative to BST’ that could explain why my per-user-profile time was wrong, and it will go wrong again then this spring no? So I’ll need to adjust the offset twice a year.

If someone is in foreign-land / abroad-land, will their wall-clock local civil time be other that bst + constant? Because the times in the year when their summer time comes in are different, or they do not have summer time adjustment at all?

I’m just wondering if there is a library function easily available that will convert a UTC or Unix time value to an equivalent local wall clock value given an enumerated, named time zone.

kitz:

--- Quote ---Wondering what the offsets mentioned in the per-user profile settings are relative to?

--- End quote ---

afaik the webserver is UTC.  Not something I have specifically looked into but if I'm coding something for the site which needs a date I have to use one of the php functions to convert from Unix time. 


--- Quote ---I’m just wondering if there is a library function easily available that will convert a UTC or Unix time value to an equivalent local wall clock value given an enumerated, named time zone.
--- End quote ---
The SMF forum software controls/converts the time according to your preferences set in Profile > Look and Layout > Time format.
Its the software that does all the converting.   According to the SMF manual quote "Local Time - Since a member may be from any part of the world, their local time is displayed."


--- Quote ---So I’ll need to adjust the offset twice a year.
--- End quote ---

Shouldn't need to.  I never have had to as long as you leave settings to default.
See below for the default settings which should always display the correct time and automatically make any adjustments for BST etc.

kitz:
ETA.   

In the main SMF administration panel, I have the default Server timezone set to London. 
Therefore by default the software will automatically convert UTC to the current clock time for London. 
If you've changed it to  -1 then the software will assume you are in a different time zone location.  You need to change it back to 0.

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