Issue with date handling

[+muppix]

I'm curious, are there any known defects with regards to dates? I recently collected a TB from a cache, but the date / timestamp of this action was shown as one day before the TB was placed in the cache. Today I moved another TB from cache to cache, and that's showing two different dates too, despite there being only around 30 "real" minutes between actions. Thoughts?

[+niraD]

1 hour ago, muppix said:

I'm curious, are there any known defects with regards to dates?

Yes. The current time- and date-handling code has a number of bugs.

[+dprovan]

1 hour ago, muppix said:

Thoughts?

I'm really glad I live in the same timezone as Seattle?

 

I assume you're logging from the field since the problems you've mentioned seem like they're glitches caused by the fact that logs done through the app are tagged with a specific time, and -- from what I've heard -- there are some difficulties in how your timestamp generated in your local timezone is interpreted by the software back in Seattle at UTC-7. As a software developer with some experience in dealing with timezones, I can understand the problems and often imagine such irregularities as being result of GS making the best of bad choices. But you are experiencing an unreliable clock, so it makes perfect sense for you to call them "bugs".

 

If you log from the website, you pick the date yourself, so it's somewhat less of a problem, but it's still not perfect.

[+muppix]

On 19/06/2018 at 4:19 PM, dprovan said:

But you are experiencing an unreliable clock, so it makes perfect sense for you to call them "bugs"

 

I don't understand which part is supposed to be unreliable - my iPhone 6S or the 9+ GPS satellites I'm constantly connected to. Travelling 6 miles is hardly crossing timezones. Surely those satellites would know where I am and what the time is? I too work for a US company (we even have an office in Seattle) and while I sometimes find it frustrating that all our logs use PST we can just about manage to get the date right.

[+dprovan]

1 hour ago, muppix said:

 

I don't understand which part is supposed to be unreliable - my iPhone 6S or the 9+ GPS satellites I'm constantly connected to. Travelling 6 miles is hardly crossing timezones. Surely those satellites would know where I am and what the time is? I too work for a US company (we even have an office in Seattle) and while I sometimes find it frustrating that all our logs use PST we can just about manage to get the date right.

I meant the "clock" at geocaching.com that gets confused about when who found what.

[+muppix]

On 20/06/2018 at 10:37 PM, dprovan said:

I meant the "clock" at geocaching.com that gets confused about when who found what.

 

Fair enough. One idea would be to store everything as UTC and then translate to local time on-the-fly, like Garmin Basecamp* seems to. Guess they hard-coded PST somewhere and have been regretting it ever since. 

 

* Ever tried exporting a track log that crosses multiple timezones for tagging photos in Lightroom? Oh, the pain!

[+niraD]

17 minutes ago, muppix said:

Guess they hard-coded PST somewhere and have been regretting it ever since.

Pretty much. This started as a hobby site, and grew from there. A lot of that old code is still around, and it's baked into some of the core systems so fixing/refactoring it is non-trivial. It's on their radar, but they want to really fix it. They don't want to replace one broken system with a differently broken system. So don't hold your breath.

[+muppix]

Do we know if it's possible to volunteer services to Groundspeak? Is there a closed beta group? I'd be surprised if there aren't any UX specialists / coders / general functionality consultants in the community.

[+niraD]

4 hours ago, muppix said:

Do we know if it's possible to volunteer services to Groundspeak? Is there a closed beta group? I'd be surprised if there aren't any UX specialists / coders / general functionality consultants in the community.

There is a private "Testing" section of the forums. A lot of changes have been released to the production site without any posts in those forums though. And when they do post, it tends to be "take a look at what we've done with this", not "help us code/design this".