Forum dates/time are off by an hour

[MrEyes]

Hello all,

I have been running my forum without any problems for some time now. However today at around 11:50 the site went down for around 30 seconds (currently being investigated by the host). When it came back everything seems to be working fine apart from the times on forum activity.

For example, a post made today at 13:46 is showing as 12:46

I have run the following PHP on the server:

$date = date( "d/m/Y H:i", time() );
echo $date

and this displays the correct GMT time (i.e. 30/04/2008 13:07 when executed at real world time of 14:07 (as the UK is currently GMT+1))

Also when the server came back after the blip users were seeing messages like:

"This forum requires that you wait 30 seconds between searches. Please try again in 663 seconds."

Does anybody have any ideas on how to resolve this?

EDIT : This is effecting both guests and registered users

EDIT : if it helps at all these are my ACP Date and Time Options

Datestamp Display Option - Yesterday / Today
Default Time Zone Offset - (GMT) Western Europe Time, London, Lisbon, Casablanca
Enable Daylight Savings - Yes
Format For Date - d-m-y
Format For Time - H:i
Format For Registration Date - M Y
Format For Birthdays with Year Specified - F j, Y
Format For Birthdays with Year Unspecified - F j
Log Date Format - H:i, jS M Y

EDIT: After reading through a few posts here and on vb.com a common suggestion is the usercp level configuration items, having checked a few accounts (all users are seeing incorrect times) the settings are:

Time Zone: (GMT) Western Europe Time, London, Lisbon, Casablanca
DST Correction Option: Automatically detect DST settings

Which I believe to be correct

[Marco van Herwaarden]

If the time suddenly changes, then this indicates that the server time has probably been adjusted. Unless you have ran queries to change the timezone settings of all users, this is the most likely cause.

This would also explain why members get these very long search timeouts (which can ONLY be caused by a change of the server time). The search problems should resolve themself once the time difference (server time set back 1 hour, so after 1 hour time things should turn back to normal) has lapsed.

[MrEyes]

Your are right the search problems have gone now.

However the server time is correct but the forum display time is still out by an hour.

I have just run the PHP code described above again which returned "30/04/2008 16:00" which is correct as the server runs on GMT and I believe that VB auto detects DST. So it seems that for some reason PHP/VB or something doesn't realise we are currently +1

[Lynne]

Make sure you have the correct time set in vboptions > date & time options also. If your server time was off before (did you ever check it before this?), then maybe you just set the whole site up to run according to it's time then.

[MrEyes]

After speaking to the host they have resolved the time issue, it would seem the server went down and when it came back up it reverted to a default time policy that was incorrect.

So this is sort of fixed...

All posts/threads etc made after the host fixed the problem are now displaying the correct time, however everything posted before this is an hour out.

The only solution I can think of is a SQL statement to increment all times by 1 hour, however I don't want to do this if there is an alternative solution.

Oddily enough, posts made before the server crashed are also an hour out.