I've just encountered a transient error with respect to timezones.

While logged in I viewed a thread to which I had contributed and noticed that the time on one of my posts was incorrect (because I was asleep at the reported time). It was around 4 hours out. Looking at the responses to my post the timestamps there were also out by the same sort of amount. I then up-voted a couple of nodes on the thread and on doing so the reloaded page showed the correct times (or rather the times in the correct zone) again. My user's timezone is Europe/London and the reported incorrect times appear to have been 4 hours behind this (ie. UTC-3).

Obviously this does not constitute a major problem in and of itself. But just in case it is a symptom of something much more serious I thought it worth reporting.

If it helps trace it, the page with the incorrect timezones was Re^2: The Future of Perl 5 and was loaded at 2018-08-22 08:04 GMT, according to the Other Users nodelet.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Timezone wobble
by Corion (Patriarch) on Aug 22, 2018 at 08:30 UTC

    I think this is because currently, Perlmonks gets served from machines that still run *BSD (where the timezone is displayed correctly) and machines running Ubuntu (where the timezone is displayed incorrectly).

    I also think that most likely, the Ubuntu machines actually use GMT as the local timezone/clock, so some of our patching to make timezones display correctly can soon be removed.

[reply]
Re: Timezone wobble
by choroba (Cardinal) on Mar 24, 2021 at 16:03 UTC
    Just happened to me, I accidentally opened RAT in two different tabs. Here are the screenshots of the respective dev consoles.

    The same node is displayed with a different colour with the following title attribute (balloon): 

    Created at 2021-03-24 16:26 (26 minutes ago)
Created at 2021-03-24 12:26 (4 hours ago)

    [download]

    map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
Re: Timezone wobble
by afoken (Chancellor) on Mar 24, 2021 at 19:39 UTC

    Just a rough idea: While rendering the page, add the current time zone used to the page, as string or time difference to UTC. Perhaps simply in an HTML comment, or after the the timestamp. If the time zone is messed up, it should become obvious in the output.

    Alexander

    --
    Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)
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Re: Timezone wobble
by hippo (Archbishop) on Mar 12, 2021 at 12:12 UTC

    Having not encountered this for a long time (months) it has just happened again. Is something afoot or have I just been really unobservant until now?

    🦛

[reply]

      I think something similar has happened to me, too. Several times during the last few months, actually. A fresh posting of mine appears several hours old after refreshing Recently Active Threads. I never really checked if the posting actually travelled back in time, but it seemed to me that the Recently Active Threads page somehow messed up time zones while displaying posting timestamps.

      Alexander

      --
      Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)
[reply]

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