*slowly backs away towards the threads emergency exit*

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https://www.net-armageddon.org - The official NetEA (Epic Armageddon) site and resource.

Hi!

Bar the door before he gets away!

Primarch

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Primarch


The Primarchload
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Grab him Primarch! I have some headphones here with that Shoop Shoop shite on a loop.

People think Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs was sadistic... Pfft, the guy was a rank amateur.

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Hi!

Well, lets be nice with him Bissler. If we traumatize him too much he won't be able to maintain the forums we like so much.

Primarch

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Primarch


The Primarchload
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You're the admin, there is no escape for you. This is why you need a co-admin, who you can then blame for these technical issues .

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Hi!

BWahaha! Good one!

Primarch

_________________
Primarch


The Primarchload
Magnetized Titans Tutorial
Net Epic Gold
Heresy Rules

I can see what you're doing here Primarch. It's the old "good cop, bad cop" routine. Very well, you play your part and I'll play mine... *holds Cher-playing headphones menacingly by CS' head while Primarch offers him flowers*

_________________
Clickable links for more Epic goodness:

Life of Die Channel including Epic Podcasts and Battle Reports

Epic 40K Players Page on Facebook
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I would guess that the time displayed on a post is always supposed to be in the local time zone of the person viewing it, not the time zone of whoever posted it. So if you change your timezone, the times displayed on all the posts, new or old, will change.

I would expect the forum software to check the server time when it receives a post, and record the timestamp in the database. Normally when timestamps are stored they are stored as "seconds since epoch", which is effectively standardised with respect to time zone. (Epoch is 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970). It is just a number. The timestamp is converted back to a local timezone for display purposes - the same number can be expressed in any time zone. I'm afraid I don't know exactly how the forum implements things; in theory if it is implemented well it should not be necessary for the forum software to know what timezone the forum itself is "in" - only the absolute server time (in seconds since epoch) and each user's declared time zone. So maybe the admin setting for forum timezone is just the default timezone to use for new registrants?

The first thing I would look at is the server OS time on the command line. If that is wrong in absolute terms (i.e. the right timezone but the wrong time, or vice versa) then, if the above is true, nothing you set in the forum's admin settings will help. Failing that, it could be a bug in the forum software or one of its libraries.

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Kyrt, I agree with your conclusions regarding the timestamp being from the perspective of the viewer rather than the sender.

Hena as a simple test, do what I did. Note the timestamp displayed on your last post, change the time settings for your account, and then re-check the post. You will find that the timestamp has apparently changed.

I found that I had to set my "local time" to be 1 hour ahead of what it should be in order to get my timestamps to display correctly - and this reset the timestamp displayed on *all* posts that I was looking at, both mine and everyone else's.

And while I was doing this, Irisado did not detect any change to the times of my posts as far as he was concerned, so bearing out Kyrt's conclusions that these settings affect the view of the viewer rather than the date/time settings of the sender.

It is true that the board sets the time based on your location in the world when you are logged in. When you are not logged in, it defaults back to the regular board clock time zone.

To be honest, I had assumed that this was mostly resolved and people had sorted this out now. Is it still causing a problem for people?

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I just selected a European time zone in the end. This fixed the clock but the problem I have is that all posts are now displayed in German! This is useless as they only taught French and/or Spanish at my school.

Note: only one of the two points stated above is true.

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It doesn't bother me personally, but yes it is still wrong. From what I can infer, changing the forum settings only affect the default timezone (e.g. for not-logged-in users). If so, to fix it you will have to look at the server time.

I just did a GET request on the server homepage (www.tacticalwargames.net), which rules out the forum and is a way to ask the web server software (Apache) directly what it thinks the time is. It tells me in the HTTP headers that the server time is "Wed, 23 Apr 2014 09:02:30 GMT". The fact that it is expressed in GMT isn't a problem per se (web servers often express it in GMT/Zulu time by default anyway), but the clock itself is one hour behind in absolute terms (the real time was 11:02:30 BST, which expressed in GMT is 10:02:30).

So, the server clock is wrong and must be changed to fix the problem "properly". If you're concerned about having to change it twice a year, bear in mind that if the server is set up correctly to use an NTP server, it should not be necessary to change it manually. Are you on a completely self-managed system? If not, maybe you can just bounce this one to the hosting provider with a link to this post?

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Kyrt, that's great analysis there, thank you.

Having the wrong forum time bothers me in the sense that I feel somewhat disorientated when one forum is telling me the wrong time, while all the others I frequent are telling me the correct one. If it's something that would require substantial downtime to fix though, then it's not worth doing.

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