Time Issues
 

If I am a guest, my forum time is:

All times are GMT -4. The time now is 10:40 AM.

If I am logged in as a user, my forum time is:

All times are GMT -5. The time now is 9:40 AM.

Any ideas?

I think when you are a guest it uses the default time zone from the settings in the ACP, but when you're logged in it uses whatever the user has chosen in the userCP options.

ETA: There is also "Enable Daylight Savings" for guests under "Date and Time Options", maybe it has to do with that?

Weird, under vBulletin Options > Date and Time Options, I have the default time zone set to (GMT -5) Eastern Time, which is correct. Also, Daylight Savings time is enabled. What else could be causing this issue?

Check the time on your server. vBulletin gets it's time from the server. If the server time is off, your forum time will be off.

So, contact my host, right Lynne?

If you don't have access to your server to look for yourself, then yes, contact your host.

It turns out that it's the time on my server. I called them to see if they could change it and they say they couldn't change the time for the entire server. He said I could fix it with a bit of PHP programming though. Is this true?

Are you serious? lol. Just change the setting in your vboptions then.

I already did that. The issue is when guests are viewing the forum...which displays the server time.

Could that be the problem? Shouldn't it be disabled now? (Edit again - I was right the first time).

Her's some information...

In 2006, daylight time begins on April 2 and ends on October 29.
In 2007, daylight time begins on March 11 and ends on November 4. [New law goes into effect.]
In 2008, daylight time begins on March 9 and ends on November 2.
In 2009, daylight time begins on March 8 and ends on November 1.

Does this mean that I needed to disable DST (in vBulletin Options) on November 1st?

According to the manual (http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/v...group_datetime),

"This setting is not automatic and it will need to be changed when the timezone changes twice a year."

That's surprising - now I wonder why there wasn't a bunch of people asking about that when the time changed. Maybe it works automatically on some servers?

Or maybe most people just have the guest time set to GMT.

Disabling DST in vBulletin Options didn't change anything for the guest time. It still displays GMT -4 just as it did before. Oh well, the only conclusion that I can draw from this is that the vBulletin software looks at the host server time.