Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Post History

66%
+2 −0
Q&A Closed question time looks like local time but is not

Below a question, the time posted is displayed, and hovering over it shows an exact timestamp: Notice that the timestamp is followed by a "Z" to indicate that this time is in the timezone UT...

0 answers  ·  posted 5mo ago by trichoplax‭

Question bug timestamps
#1: Initial revision by user avatar trichoplax‭ · 2024-07-07T21:39:42Z (5 months ago)
Closed question time looks like local time but is not
Below a question, the time posted is displayed, and hovering over it shows an exact timestamp:

> ![The time posted below a question, showing as "36 minutes", with the full timestamp showing as hovertext "2024-07-07T20:47:13Z"](https://meta.codidact.com/uploads/zms5cjrlsc5i6k2pqqqerx5wiy02)

Notice that the timestamp is followed by a "Z" to indicate that this time is in the [timezone UTC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#Time_zones) (which in the UK at this time of year differs from my local timezone due to daylight saving time). This makes immediately clear to me that this is not my local time.

However, when a question is closed, a time is displayed without any indication of its timezone, which might lead someone to assume it is local time:

> ![Closed notice on a question, with the date and time showing without a timezone label, as "Jul 7, 2024 at 21:21"](https://meta.codidact.com/uploads/nf4nxgzbljlz5bqwvqqbn8dkmslh)

Note that this time is also UTC, which is unexpected. I know because I saw this closed question shortly after it was closed, so local time would not be possible.

I would not expect exact timings of question closure to often be important, so I'm mostly raising this for completeness to be fixed at some future point. It might also be worth reviewing other places where times are displayed without a timezone indicator, in case there are others that could be misleading.