Can't possibly understand , what is the purpose of displaying local time in the member identification box?
International participants, maybe if you don't get a reply right away it is because it is the middle of the night for someone being corresponded with? It is there from an add-on, which was installed to permit people to verify their own timezone as this software doesn't display your local time at the bottom like the old one used to.
In my opinion "location" provides sufficient info. Removing "local time" could save some space in the most often quite lengthy empty display.
I never thought about it for a minute, but now that it's an issue, I've gone in and changed my time since I'm out of my usual time zone. I hope you're all happy. Now I have to set a reminder to reset it when I get back home. I can see it helping when people put their location as just "Portland" or some name that's used around the US, but it seems like a "make-work" request to me, particularly since it's useful to some and only one extra line on the page. On the other hand, if people aren't setting it, so it's mostly displaying the wrong time, then it might be worth removing. I totally flipped my answer as I was typing it.
Funnily, there are three different pages where an admin can set it to appear or not appear. Only two of the three can be disabled, the one that can't is the one that we are discussing. So, it is all or nothing for that particular plugin.
If anybody was really paying attention to "local time", seeing following info: wcutler location Vancouver, BC, Canada Local Time 10:39 AM and just in the next post Daniel Mosquin location Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Local Time 12:39 AM could be really confusing. Seeing something like that I would think there is something wrong with the application, or (if I was not familiar with Canadian geography) that Vancouver, BC, Canada and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada are two different places. I don't believe too many people would guess that "local time" has nothing to do with the "location" displayed together in the member info box, but rather with the physical location of the device from which the post has been sent. How do you set it? Anyhow, I don't think too many members will set it themselves, so with some who did and others who didn't it, and some who did it incorrectly, and still with some who forgot to re-set it, it could be still less useful and more confusing. Having said that, if it is left or not on the display does not matter too much to me, I don't look at it anyhow, just don't like too much those wide gaps between posts.
I'm not a fan of the wide gaps either, but I wasn't going to worry about that until we start applying new templates, which won't happen until I have time to resolve the large image issue.
Strange: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - wcutler Location: Vancouver, BC Canada Local Time: 12:39 PM - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Daniel Mosquin Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Local Time: 2:39 PM - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Does Vancouver cover two time zones???!
Sorry, but all this doesn't make much sense to me. How am I supposed to know if the member is traveling right now or not? What if I looked at his/her post the next day? May be he or she is already somewhere else by now and, being in a hurry, forgot to re-set her time?
It looks like it can cover many more than two depending how many Vancouverite members are on the move, he-he.
But you're sure there was a reason, right? The most useful thing I learned in all my years of work was "there's always a reason for something"; ignore that at your peril. In this case, since we were discussing the time zones, I thought it was there for some reason, and there was the option to set it as soon as I selected preferences, so I thought to make it accurate for where I am right now, in case people want to know if it's likely I would be awake or something, whatever Daniel and Junglekeeper said. But the location setting wasn't right there, so I didn't go looking for that, and besides, I thought location was for where you live, to cover most of your postings, and you would mention if you posted something from elsewhere. So, to make it consistent, you have to set location and time zone in two different places, not all that practical, and I'm guessing but have not done any checking to see if people do not set the time zone. I will check the How-to, if there is some relevant section, though I'm pretty convinced that people do not read that stuff. And though I thought to try to make the time zone setting useful, I'm not so inclined to change my location, so I will set the time zone back to Vancouver. [Edited] I did already have that in the Customize your experience How-to. I've just bolded the line about that, and linked to that file in the Sign-on How-to.
Looks like "Local Time" can mean three different things: 1. local time for the location specified right above it in the member info box 2. local time for the actual physical location of the device from which the post has been sent 3. none of the above. Which of the three is left to the intuition of the person looking at it to decide.
So why do we keep it? It is heavy on system performance the info it supplies is unreliable, and it makes the gaps between posts even wider.
It was requested by a member to have it. I would like to keep the performance hits the same for now, so I can measure against what happens when we move the database to its own server, which is the next (long-time-to-get-accomplished) step in trying to resolve the big issue, which is image display problems. Regarding the gaps between posts, I am not concerned about that until we have the new templates. Templates won't be addressed until the image display problems are resolved.
