Preferences: Time Zones
How about actually putting in the real World time zones? I live in England & your "Western Europe" option is about 5 hours out of time with me & all my clients.
The list has now been updated to be a little more user friendly. Thanks for your suggestion!
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Matthew,
No problem! We're glad that we have people like you that feel strongly about some of the small things like this. Without people like you, we'd probably be mistaken on quite a few other things like this as well.
We have updated the list; please take a look and let us know if you have any additional questions.
Thanks again for your comments and suggestion!
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Matthew commented
Hi Adam,
I'm not trying to be annoying or argumentative here so please don't think I'm just being picky for the sake of it. I think it's these small things that will make your service more accessible & user friendly.
I'm not suggesting you made them up, but those "time zones" for Australia are wrong (or at least they're not actually the standard used there). I'd like to know where they're sourced from because they are definitely not correct. It's not that they're just overlapping or duplicating either. The "time zones" listed on your drop down are definitely not the way people in Australia, New Zealand, the UK or most of Europe, based on my experience, use to calibrate time.
eg:
Australia/NSW & Australia/Sydney - Sydney is a city in the State of NSW, they are not time zones. They both occupy Australian Eastern Standard Time - UTC+10:00 except during DST.
Australia/ACT & Australia/Canberra - Canberra is a city inside the Territory of ACT... They both sit inside NSW & occupy the very same time zone. Australian Eastern Standard Time (not accounting for DST).
Australia/Tasmania & Australia/Hobart - Hobart is a city in the State of Tasmania. They occupy Australian Eastern Standard Time (not accounting for DST).
Australia/Queensland & Australia/Brisbane - Brisbane is a city of the State Queensland. Australian Eastern Standard Time applies.
Australia/Victoria & Australia/Melbourne - Again, Melbourne is a city & Victoria is the containing State. Both on Australian Eastern Standard Time (not accounting for DST).
As you can see each of these options occupy the same time zone i.e.: the time is measured the same in each of these locations (excepting DST). Most of the other zones you mention have the same issue. If the following was a list of "time zones" wouldn't you question it's accuracy?
USA/California
USA/Los Angeles
USA/Texas
USA/Houston
USA/Colorado
USA/DenverAs I said in an earlier post it appears as if your drop down is completely based on geographical lists rather than actual time zones.
In the end all I'm saying is that most of the world uses the UTC/GMT method extensively to measure & calibrate time (most operating systems, software & databases use it). A full list following the example I gave earlier could easily replace everything in your drop down (excepting the US & Canada as I'm sure you know better than I how time is calibrated there) & would be more accurate.
I'll stop hassling you guys now & you can do what you feel is best.
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Thank you again for your detailed replies.
I'm sorry that you disagree with my comment that the timezones are real. The current list of timezones that we have available to query for Australia include the following: Australia/ACT, Australia/Adelaide, Australia/Brisbane, Australia/Broken_Hill, Australia/Canberra, Australia/Currie, Australia/Darwin, Australia/Eucla, Australia/Hobart, Australia/LHI, Australia/Lindeman, Australia/Lord_Howe, Australia/Melbourne, Australia/North, Australia/NSW, Australia/Perth, Australia/Queensland, Australia/South, Australia/Sydney, Australia/Tasmania, Australia/Victoria, Australia/West, Australia/Yancowinna
These are not timezones that we have made up ourselves, but it is very possible that some of them may overlap and some may not be widely used. We will look into consolidating the list.
In any case, I appreciate your comments and we will look into what the best option might be for cleaning up the time zones and making everything a little less cluttered and confusing.
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Matthew commented
Oh, this might be of interest to you as well. It shows the difference between my local time in the UK & the time your website says "Western Europe" is.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wtf4photography/8479756625/in/photostream
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Matthew commented
I agree that Daylight Savings Time (DST) is going to mess it up a bit. It shouldn't be too big an issue though?
On other sites where there are time zone lists I've often seen a check box used to indicate if DST applies to the location. I figure that's linked to something in the backend database to ensure that the +1 hour is added at the appropriate time. This means that the list can be kept uncluttered.
However, I disagree with your comment "Although the timezones that we have listed are real timezones...". There is no way that the examples I mentioned in my earlier message (Brisbane, QLD, LHI & Yancowinna) are real timezones (I am an Australian living in the UK). They represent locations that are covered by time zones (in some case the same one).
Your "time zone" listing of Australia has over 20 options! Australia has only 3 time zones. Admittedly DST does occur inside 2 of those zones but that still doesn't require 20+ options.
Australian Western Standard Time - UTC+08:00
Australian Central Standard Time - UTC+09:30
Australian Eastern Standard Time - UTC+10:00http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Australia
Alternatively, you list 3 European time zones - Western, Central & Eastern Europe... Europe is as wide as the USA after all so 3 time zones is way to few to cover it. Europe actually has 7 or 8 official zones & they don't all conform to geographical location as you can see on this Wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Europe
Most places outside the US utilise UTC/GMT so it is easily recognisable. A listing such as this following (just a quick knock up, it's not complete) & a check box DST option would cause few issues. This list will still be easier to use than the current one.
UTC+05:00 - Karachi, Tashkent
UTC+05:30 - Colombo, Delhi
UTC+05:45 - Kathmandu
UTC+06:00 - Almaty, Dhaka, Yekaterinburg
UTC+06:30 - Yangon
UTC+07:00 - Jakarta, Bangkok, Novosibirsk, Hanoi
UTC+08:00 - Perth, Beijing, Manila, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Denpasar, Krasnoyarsk
UTC+09:00 - Seoul, Tokyo, Pyongyang, Ambon, Irkutsk
UTC+10:00 - Canberra, Yakutsk, Port Moresby
UTC+11:00 - Vladivostok, Noumea -
Thanks for your comments! The only problem with listing a straight "UTC+X hours" set of timezones is that people in different timezones also have different Daylight Savings (European Summer) time adjustments as well. If we didn't list it out by specific timezones, we could not automatically adjust for these time differences. For example, although both Arizona (US) and Utah (US) share a common time for most of the year, Utah observes daylight savings time and Arizona doesn't. The same is true for various countries/states/counties/cities throughout the world.
Although the timezones that we have listed are real timezones, you are correct that the list could probably be cleaned up a bit. We'll look through the different timezones that people have already selected and see if we can trim down some of the others that have never been selected. If you (or anyone else) has additional timezones that you would like to see *added* to the list, we can certainly do that as well.
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Matthew commented
I couldn't set my local timezone because at just after midnight (local) the Western Europe option in your list was showing around 9pm (previous day) so I left it at the default (which was Mountain Time? - I figure that's a US thing.). Although now the Western Europe is showing the correct time (weird). Your list was confusing & difficult to find the correct time zone due to it's length & organisation.
I wouldn't suggest adding any items to the list you need to cut it down & organise it better... It's messy, real messy. Australia, for instance, has multiple listings for the same time zone. Brisbane (City) is in Queensland (State) but they're both listed separately. LHI & Lord Howe (Island) are the same place & both listed. There's more... Yancowinna! That's a small local government county in the far West of NSW. It doesn't have it's own time zone, it's part of South Australia which is UTC+9:30.
You should pretty much replace the entire time zone dropdown with a simple per hour UTC/GMT list instead of trying to break it all up by locations. Except the US as I figure they're your major market so a more detailed list would be required - & you've got weird zones. ;-)
It's as simple as identifying "UTC±00:00, Z" whose principle cities are; Accra, Abidjan, Casablanca, Dakar, Dublin, Lisbon & London. From there every other timezone is just +X hours or -X hours (where X is the number of hours difference).
I notice you've got Chile listed using UTC/GMT.
Wikipedia has a full list of the UTC zones & the differences;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zones_by_UTC_offset -
I was just double-checking on your time zone, and in England right now it is currently 10:58PM on February 16th. Our Western Europe timezone setting also has the current time set as 10:58PM. Can you double check the timezone information again? It looks like your account is currently set to Mountain Time (US), which is 3:58PM right now.
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Great suggestion! The reason that we don't have your timezone is simply because it hasn't been requested before. The list of available timezones that we could include is *very* long and includes many many duplicates were the timezones overlap. What timezone(s) would you like to see added to the list?