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I asked this question yesterday, approximately 18 hours ago ("2011-12-13 20:24:03Z" according to the hover text), and it's still being displayed as "today".

I assume the "Z" in the timestamp refers to Zulu time, so I converted my current time to Zulu, and the date (2011-12-14) differs from the timestamp on the question.

I don't pretend to understand all of the complexities when converting time zones, but I thought it was strange enough to report. If it matters at all, I'm in US-Eastern.

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"today" on posts means "within 24 hours". Since when yesterday/today/tomorrow cuts off varies by timezone, it'd be even weirder to show "yesterday" for a question posted at 7:59PM EST when I browsed to it 2 minutes later (pretend this says 6:59PM for EDT!).

Given we can't render based on your timezone, we opt for units of time, 24 hours here, it's the least-weird approach to the issue. Since no solution is perfect, we chose what makes the most sense given the constraints.

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  • I thought that might be the case. Thanks for confirming.
    – Adam Tuttle
    Dec 14, 2011 at 18:00
  • 6 years later...is there a reason this can't be rendered based on the browser's timezone? You can easily get the offset or even an ISO date/time with offset from javascript, which the site is clearly using.
    – ND Geek
    Jun 1, 2017 at 12:46

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