Has The System Date Been Set Wrong?
I just made a few changes to a recently deceased actor and my changes, made on Sunday the 8th, were posted as January 9th. My computer system date is set to the the 8th. Something seems a little off here. Ahem.
Answers
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Interesting. I was just looking at my post and noticed I had been logged out. I also noticed the date of my posting was 12:08 AM and after I logged back in it now shows as 7:08 PM.
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Someone forgot to turn on the UTC time zone differential?
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It's probably a bug or something like that.
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I've noticed off and on that the date shown in the Latest Changes box doesn't necessarily match the date shown in the actual Change Log for that same action. I think the Latest Changes box is set to a different time zone, probably UTC, while the rest of the site is programmed to use whatever time zone your browser reports.
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FamilySearch is on UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).
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Fair enough but I'm on Eastern Time which is UTC -5hr.
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No. I am watching Masterpiece Theater's All Creatures Great and Small and the time is 9:31 PM EST on January 8th, Sunday. Thus the UTC is 2:31 AM in Greenwich on January 9th. It's Monday in England and Sunday in Florida. If it's 2:31 AM Jan 8th for you then you're, well, I'm not sure where you'd be on the globe.
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It's like the difference between the display and standard values for a date or place: some pages or sections use one, others use the other. Similarly, some pages or sections display the time in the system timezone, which Amy indicates to be UTC (as I thought). An example of such a section is the "Latest Changes" box on a profile's Details page. Other pages or sections, on the other hand, allow your browser to convert UTC to your local timezone for display purposes. An example of such a section is the Community. I am also in EST, so Amy's post about the time in UTC being 2:19 a.m. has a timestamp of 9:20 p.m. for me.
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Well let's not get crazy here. All computer systems everywhere use UTC with an appropriate time zone offset for where they are physically located. For a server on the East coast of America to use straight up UTC means they are pretending to be located in England and that will muck things up around the globe since everyone else uses UTC with time zone offsets.
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@WDan5, there's no pretending involved; the time zone has nothing to do with a server's physical location. I believe most servers are set to UTC, everywhere on the planet. Some things on a server use that time zone without any sort of offset. For example, the Community's weekly "Leader Board" gets reset by UTC, which comes out to 7 p.m. on Sundays in Eastern Standard Time. On the west coast, it happens at 4 p.m. on Sundays. Usually, displayed times use your local offset if you're logged in (i.e., if the site knows what offset to use), but the server's default otherwise; that default might be the server's time zone (usually UTC, as I said), or it might be whatever time zone most of the site's visitors live in. For a global site like FS, defaulting to UTC is really the only sensible choice.
It's a different question why the "Latest Changes" box doesn't apply the user's offset to its reported dates. Perhaps someone simply forgot that line from the code, and/or figured it wasn't important enough to go back and add it? Although it's also possible that on a site as complex and convoluted as this, it's more than a matter of a line of code: the process that generates that list might not have easy access to individual user data. (I wouldn't know; I have a pretty good grasp of basic HTML and know enough CSS to recognize it, but most of this site's coding is gibberish to me.)
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