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I just noticed that the scheduled event page thinks that Feb 8 is already tomorrow, while today is only Feb 6. The town hall on Feb 7 is correctly displayed as "starts tomorrow".

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This is on the page http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/269/gaming-town-hall-chat?tab=schedule

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  • The Feb. 8 one starts at 02:00 GMT, the Feb 7 one at 20:00. The system seems to treat the 02:00 time as still part of Feb 7, which kind of makes sense I guess – Pekka supports GoFundMonica Feb 6 '11 at 17:16
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    Stupid timezones. But I still think it should take timezones into account, else it gets pretty confusing. – Mad Scientist Feb 6 '11 at 17:20
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The "tomorrow" logic is the same logic (and to be precise, even the same code) that "prettifies" the time on the main site (e.g. "This question has an open bounty ending tomorrow").

"Tomorrow" here is defined as "in more than 24, but less than 48 hours".

Yes, this isn't a perfect solution, but considering the worldwide audience of the sites, there's no way you can do that without being wrong somewhere in the world.

And 2am UTC on February 8 is (e.g.) 9pm ET on February 7, while 7pm on February 6 (approx. the time I'm writing this) is 2pm ET on February 6 – so there you have an example of a time zone where "tomorrow" is actually correct.

When it comes to representing time in a way that kinda works everywhere in the world, these kinds of compromises are pretty much inevitable.

Also, we now show the precise time in the user's time zone on the events page, to avoid any confusion.

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    Chat events, unlike other elements on the site, are very time sensitive. How about showing, after the fuzzy time, the exact time as seen on mouse hover? "Event starts tomorrow, 2011-02-07 20:00:00Z" – badp Feb 6 '11 at 19:46

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