Time display on forum is incorrect

[ConMan]

I suspect this gets filed under "Stupid things PHPBB does" (or maybe just "Stupid things prosilver does"), but anyway ...

The time I see on posts is definitely local time, but it always has "UTC" attached to the end. Given that I'm currently in UTC+10, that's pretty far off being right. So can the "UTC" be removed?

[Adacore]

It also says, in the bottom right corner of every page, "All times are UTC", regardless of what time zone I set in my profile.

EDIT: No wait, It updates, but only after you navigate off the page that says 'your preferences have been updated'. I assumed it would change on that page if it was going to. Never mind me.

[gmalivuk]

So can the "UTC" be removed?

Change your board preferences.

[TheGrammarBolshevik]

More specifically, go here.

Where it says "My date format," "Custom" is probably selected, and the box says "D M d, Y g:i a e." Get rid of the 'e' at the end.

[ConMan]

More specifically, go here.

Where it says "My date format," "Custom" is probably selected, and the box says "D M d, Y g:i a e." Get rid of the 'e' at the end.

That's seriously what's causing the problem? Wow. That'll teach me to not learn the PHP date standard. Or look up just what those things in the date field actually stand for.

[Adacore]

Well, theoretically, an 'e' or 'T' should give something other than UTC/GMT if you change your timezone settings, I'd think. But I guess the forum isn't clever enough to feed that through to the PHP Date stuff.

[davean]

Well, theoretically, an 'e' or 'T' should give something other than UTC/GMT if you change your timezone settings, I'd think. But I guess the forum isn't clever enough to feed that through to the PHP Date stuff.

I've never cared enough to look into that specifically but it is a sort of annoying issue that keeps coming up. I would guess it is a phpbb issue from what I have looked into though.

[phlip]

PHP's date processing tools were, for the longest time, very limited. You can show a time in (a) UTC, or (b) the server's local timezone, but that's it. If you want to do any other timezones, you have to do the processing yourself. What phpBB does is just add the appropriate timezone offset to the date and then run it through the normal gmdate() function. So, for instance, when it's showing a time for me, it's not figuring out "What time is this in UTC+10?" but rather "What time is it 10 hours after this, in UTC?"... which is mostly the same answer, but it isn't ideal (it's wrong when it comes to daylight savings for instance, and the date function will report the wrong timezone). Newer versions of PHP support more thorough timezone handling, however phpBB still officially supports older versions of PHP, so they can't rely on those new features.

Or, as I've phrased it before: PHP sucked, so phpBB had to also suck in the opposite direction to compensate, and proper timezones were lost in the crossfire.