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Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-20 23:32
by sunrat
I am mystified how the forum timestamp works. I live in Melbourne which is currently UTC +11 including daylight saving, and forum preferences are set to that. I just made a post at 11:16 AM but the forum stamped it as 9:26. :?

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-21 01:09
by GarryRicketson
I don't know, my clock says it is 7:57 pm, (19:57), I am posting to see what the forum clock says.
===== edit ====
It shows my post as being made at 20:09 ,
so it seems to just be a few minuets difference for me. In your "user control panel", >preferences, is the "daylight savings in summer" option, checked ?

Clocks are generally not very accurate, I have never seen 2 clocks that show the exact same time , all the time,...but almost 2 hours, I will agree that is a big difference,...

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-21 01:20
by GarryRicketson
Test again, my pc shows 20:10 ,.... still about the same difference.

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-21 01:40
by sunrat
Test again. DST was not checked so I changed it as we are on DST now. Other forums seem to detect that automatically.

Edit: posted at 1:29 local time, forum shows 12:40. 51 minutes earlier than actual time. Just weird.

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-21 06:02
by Head_on_a_Stick
There has been a thread about this before, iirc.

Perhaps the server is in a high gravity field and is experiencing time dilation effects.

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-21 11:07
by sunrat
Thanks Head_on_a_Stick. That seems to be the most likely explanation. :wink:

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-21 19:05
by Head_on_a_Stick
^ Sorry sunrat, that was intended as a joke :D

Thanks for humouring me though, you are very kind.

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-22 06:32
by debiman
i have set my timezone correctly, and checked "DST is in effect" (although it isn't right now, not until next spring), and still the time is 11 minutes off.

i suspect that many forum members never manually adjust their timezone (and the forum software doesn't do it automatically), so post times are all over the place.

but all that should happen in whole hours, those 11 mins suggest that the server's hardware clock is off?

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-22 09:25
by sunrat
Only 11 minutes? Gravity must be heavier in Australia than where you are.

Posted at 21:14 local time. Post shows 20:25. That's 49 minutes. Maybe I mathed wrong in the earlier post or maybe gravity is fluctuating.

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-22 10:53
by yeti
sunrat wrote:Only 11 minutes? Gravity must be heavier in Australia than where you are.

Posted at 21:14 local time. Post shows 20:25. That's 49 minutes. Maybe I mathed wrong in the earlier post or maybe gravity is fluctuating.
...counting the days until we see a "show your local forum time" thread...

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2018-11-23 05:41
by debiman
sunrat wrote:Only 11 minutes? Gravity must be heavier in Australia than where you are.

Posted at 21:14 local time. Post shows 20:25. That's 49 minutes. Maybe I mathed wrong in the earlier post or maybe gravity is fluctuating.
60 minutes - 11 minutes = 49 minutes.
so i'm guessing you're actually one hour off somewhere in your settings.

i hear there's been recent changes or at least efforts to abolish DST in many countries, and not all software might have caught up with it yet. could explain an otherwise unexplainable 1 hour difference.

Re: Forum time

Posted: 2019-01-05 02:02
by llivv
I update ntp manually once a month or two or three and my drift is usually not more than a few tenths of a second, And I don't have ntpd installed. I noticed in sid that ntpdate is deprecated and so I had ntpsec installed
but nptdate didn't connect to any servers. I checked the /etc/defaults/ntpsec-ntpdate config file and changed a few of the servers to connect to 0.pool.npt.org and 3.pool.ntp.org just in case the config file was read form right to left. Still no server connection. So I purged ntpsec and installed the deprecated nptdate and updated ntpdate-debian and my drift was 4 tenths of a second off the computers clock.
I also dpkg-reconfigure tzdata and switched to UTC for this test.
I'm posting to this thread at 02:51.00 UTC
lets see what happens