News and Comments Timestamps

Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2008 9:37 am

This isn't specific to RavenNuke. I switched servers recently, and this morning I realized the Comments modules was showing weird times for the forum posts. And the news stories on the home page had funny times.

Both of these things call formatTimestamp() in mainfile.php. I noticed that there was a

$time -= date('Z');

in that function which is apparently some way to put in a correction for time zones. I thought about this for a minute and it doesn't make sense for me. If times are being saved in the database as local server time, why apply a correction when you display them? I commented this line out and now my time stamps look correct for my server's timezone.

Maybe it has always been this way and I never noticed it, lol. But most likely it has something to do with me changing servers. Any thoughts on this?

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

I may be missing your point, but I prefer to see the dates in my time zone and not the server's.

Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 6:27 pm

The correction it is applying (-date('Z')) is correcting for the server's timezone, not the users. It isn't looking up the users timezone and correcting for that. It looks weird to me now.

Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 3:33 pm

I'm still confused by this. When a story is added to the queue, it uses the MySQL NOW() function for date and time. So that is inserting the current server time into the database. So when it is pulled out for display, why subtract off the server time zone correction? Especially when _DATESTRING includes %Z, the time zone indication?

Weird, it's been in there since day 1.

Code:




function formatTimestamp($time) {


    global $datetime, $locale;





    static $localeSet;     // setlocale() can be expensive to call; only need to call it once


    if (!isset($localeSet)) {


        setlocale(LC_TIME, $locale);


        $localeSet = 1;


    }





    if (!is_numeric($time)) {


        preg_match('/([0-9]{4})-([0-9]{1,2})-([0-9]{1,2}) ([0-9]{1,2}):([0-9]{1,2}):([0-9]{1,2})/', $time, $datetime);


        $time = gmmktime($datetime[4],$datetime[5],$datetime[6],$datetime[2],$datetime[3],$datetime[1]);


    }


    //$time -= date('Z');


    $datetime = strftime(_DATESTRING, $time);


    $datetime = ucfirst($datetime);


    return $datetime;


}