We are using OJS 3.1.2.4 on a CentOS 7.7 VPS (Linux kernel 3.10.0-042stab138.1 with PHP 7.2.28) from InMotion Hosting. Linux and OJS are both set to UTC. We have users across at least four time zones. I have searched this forum for “timezone” as well as used Google, but I do not see this topic addressed directly.
The date/timestamps displayed in OJS, such as on comments, do not indicate their timezone and it is unclear that the stamp is not local time - whatever that happens to be.
I see in a comment:
2020-03-17 04:15 PM
I would expect to see:
2020-03-17 04:15 PM UTC
Even better would be a setting in each user’s profile to indicate their local time_zone such that OJS can calculate and display the actual/local time for that user.
In that case, I would expect to see:
2020-03-17 11:15 AM CDT
This has led to some confusion on the part of our users. We would like to request the former, seemingly minor change. We would love to see the latter, seemingly major change.
Thanks.
Hi @maifeld,
That’s related to this issue, which has some recent discussion:
https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/5540
I’d suggest adding your thoughts over there.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
Thanks for your reply, Alec! I had seen that, but I only registered formatting. I think that’s a different issue, but I get what you are suggesting and I have added %Z to all three time_format strings in config.inc.php - thanks!
Now I will revise this enhancement request to relate to the profile-based concept briefly mentioned in #3 of that topic - I don’t want to hijack that thread. There, the discussion is different strftime formats for each user; I want the same format for all users, but for the time shown to the user to be calculated with a per-user offset (e.g., Eastern Standard, Pacific Daylight) relative to the OJS/MySQL time (UTC).
Hi all,
See Support per-user time zones · Issue #6082 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub for a feature request related to this.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team