Message Posting Time

[Neil Stainton]

I find it a bit frustrating that all the messages have the posting time in your CT local timezone - especially as I'm not sure how many hours it is behind GMT.

I guess you couldn't modify the discussion group software to use the poster's local time zone (in would have to be in his profiles I guess), but surely you could display the current CT time somewhere in the discussion area? That would allow me to see the time difference at a glance.

Just a suggestion,

Neil.

[jrb]

When I'm home (or using my notebook) its not a problem; but I must agree that when I check in from a computer somewhere else in the world (latest was from Oman) the time difference mucks me up!

I thik many would like to have the current e-zone time displayed .

[Andy W]

I've seen a site that posted "local" time for the person posting. That, however, really messes you up, because I don't always know what time it is in, say, Australia or Japan (although I am able to keep up with the US and UK zone's just fine)..
..a

[Neil Stainton]

> I've seen a site that posted "local" time for the person posting. That, however, really messes you up, because I don't always know what time it is in, say, Australia or Japan

I agree the above would be worse than the present system.

What I would ideally like is that if I am in the UK I see all the times in GMT (or BST), if I am in the US I see all the times in the local US time. If the Users' profiles included a timezone field when the page is created the times could be converted to the local time.

Neil.

[Mark Wood]

Call me obtuse, but what is the real need for being time conscious?

mw

[jbourke]

Neil,

The reason it doesn't do this is because it would require that each message be processed before being displayed.

If you look at the threads you will see that they are all "html" files. There is no scripting needed to display a thread. If we started processing times to display them in local time then we would have to process all the threads on each and every view. The forum would be much slower if this was done.

So that is why.

Jim

[Neil Stainton]

> If you look at the threads you will see that they are all "html" files. There is no scripting needed to display a thread.

OK, I see now. I assumed that they were built on the fly whenever a user requested a thread, now I realize the HTML is just rebuilt when a new message is posted.

> If we started processing times to display them in local time then we would have to process all the threads on each and every view. The forum would be much slower if this was done.

Yes I can see that. However although I am no Javascript expert, and it would still add an overhead, it would probably be possible to get the time to display in local time by using a static Javascript routine to read a cookie on the client's PC and then display the adjusted time. However I realize this is out of your control as the discussion software is purchased from Infopop - perhaps you could just mention it to them as a wishlist item.

Thank you for your time Jim,

Neil.