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Or why is my forum time suddenly off by one hour?

Or why is my forum time suddenly off by one hour?

We did a few days ago, you’re right.  I never even think to update my websites - I need to do that now I guess. I wish there was a way for EE to handle that automatically instead of having to manually go in to every client website when DST changes and set it.

Actually, I just noticed because all times here on the forum were suddenly off by one hour. I went into my preferences and removed the appropriate checkmark (only to undo that in two weeks’ time, I suppose), and that was that. Thanks for confirming.

If I haven’t been officially put on record as saying it, I will do so now.  I hate DST.

We can’t reliably do it automatically as every region is different, and it changes year to year.  And if the server you are hosted has not been switched, it could cause further problems.  There are hosts that actually disable DST and physically set the clocks an hour forward and back, believe it or not, which really screws with PHP’s date and time calculations.

Yes, I understand the issue behind it; you’d probably need a per-user setting, DST_start_date and DST_end_date. My server, luckily, does not switch, it runs on UTC.

Yes, I understand the issue behind it; you’d probably need a per-user setting, DST_start_date and DST_end_date. My server, luckily, does not switch, it runs on UTC.

Of course UTC does not help if you have a logged in user that did set their localization settings, and selected DST on/off for themselves 😉

I agree though, all countries should use a standard off-set from UTC based on nothing more than longitude.  Between Cell phones grabbing time automatically as you move around the country/world now.  With other devices (computers, clocks, watches, phones, gps devices, etc) simply pulling time directly from stratum-0 (gps, wwv, or cdma) time sources, or at least stratum-1 sources (a time server directly pulling from a stratum-0 source) why the world really needs these seemingly random time-zones now is nothing more than annoying at best.

Just my take 😊

And if anything research has shown that DST does not actually save energy and actually costs governments money, while totally screwing up with the human body’s internal clock causing no end of problems and headaches.  I agree with Nevin that it should be a simple matter of one’s hourly offset from UTC being based entirely on longitude.

And as Ingmar points out, it would have to be a per user setting and then Jones points out the server problem.  The server problem probably could possibly be solved simply by us putting in some manner of ping to our own little EL file that gives the current UTC time, and we use that in all EE installations to sync.  Of course, some server admins have turned off remote requests, for security reasons.  Perfect solutions seem to be a high end luxury in our world.

So, all and all, I hate DST too.

The sinister secret behind DST has been exposed.