Forum time / Message Posting Time 1 day and 23 hour apart (General)

by Londoner @, London, England, Saturday, February 12, 2011, 08:27 (4825 days ago)
edited by Londoner, Saturday, February 12, 2011, 09:00

I've recently set up the forum and am still having problems with time display. I have read all the previous comments explaining timezones etc, and I have tried varying user timezones and forum timezones but cannot fix the problem.

I have just posted a new message on my forum, and when I look at it in the index, it tells me it was posted 1 day, 23 hours ago!

I have the forum time difference set to zero and the user time differences all set to zero, but there is a one hour time difference between the displayed forum time and the displayed message posting time, last login time, etc.

I've logged in to the host and looked directly at the SQL database and can see that the SQL server timestamp on my last login time is 1 hour ahead, and is the correct date, but the server is obviously set in a different time zone.

But why the difference between the displayed forum time and the displayed login time when I am looking at them both from within the forum, and why does it say 1day23hours ago? I don't want to change the forum time as it is currently showing the correct time for all the users in my time zone, and I don't want to change everyone's individual time offset as that would make the forum time display incorrectly.

Please, can anyone help?

Partly solved

by London @, London, Saturday, February 12, 2011, 09:07 (4825 days ago) @ Londoner

Having logged out and back in the "1day 23 hour" time difference has gone, but I've still got the problem with the 1 time difference between displayed time zone and displayed message posting time, despite everything being set up with the same time difference.

Time problem diagnosed and worked around

by Londoner @, london, Sunday, February 13, 2011, 08:02 (4824 days ago) @ London

After working on this for a few hours, I have found a way to fix it. There are two parts to the problem:
1) The forum software gets it's timestamp from two different places. The forum time comes from the Apache server and the posting time stamp comes from the SQL server
2) The hosting company has these two servers out of sync by one hour. I tried a different server within the same hosting company and that one was out by 15 minutes. Third time lucky, the third SQL server had the same time as the Apache server. So I worked around the problem by migrating the forum to the third server.

After some google search, I discovered that this problem is not unusual with hosting companies. I really like the forum software, but perhaps one suggestion for improvement would be to get the forum time from the same server as the database. Then if the database server has the wrong time, it's just a matter of changing the offset in the forum configuration options.

Anyway - it's great software and a massive improvement on what I was using before, so thanks.

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Time problem diagnosed and worked around

by Alex ⌂, Sunday, February 13, 2011, 12:55 (4824 days ago) @ Londoner

The forum software gets it's timestamp from two different places.

You're right, thanks for that hint! I'll fix it as soon as possible.

Alex

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