Chat timestamps

[Doan the Nado]

Modification: This poll has been locked, because it turns out that I will be able to convert the times to your own individual time zone by using Javascript.


I think chat is going pretty well, but there are definitely a few improvements to be made. One such improvement is time stamps. The problem is that sometimes when you visit the board, you see a message that someone has written, and you're not sure how long ago it was posted. An obvious solution to this problem is to put timestamps in the post. Before you say that this is a bad idea because the window is already too small, I am one step ahead of you. There is an HTML tag called acronym which allows you to create text which will pop up when you place your mouse over it. This is a perfect solution to timestamping: I can just put an acronym tag around the person's name, and you will be able to put the mouse over their name to see when they made that post.

This is all well and good except for the fact that I have to choose a time to put in the tag. There's might be a way to use javascript after the fact to adjust it, but let's assume for the moment that there is not (if there is, it will likely be a bit complicated to implement). What time zone should the time be displayed as? I am leaning towards Eastern, mostly because it is my own time zone, but also because the majority of the American population lives in the Eastern time zone. That doesn't necessarily mean that the majority of the members live here, so that's what this poll is for. Please let me know what time zone you think should be used for timestamps.

[realitybites]

Well from the looks of it, I would suggest that you use EST time, cause looking at the members majority of them are on the EST time zone, except Nash and Doyle other than that, I say you should get every member if you can to vote, that way the outcome will be unanimous.

[Rodak]

USE GMT!!

To us Science-ticians, It's all in Greenwich Mean Time anyhow!

So is most of the Internet.

It's all listed in GMT (plus or minus some number of hours).

Be Cool!

Be Brittish!

Use GMT!!!

[realitybites]

rodak said:

USE GMT!!

To us Science-ticians, It's all in Greenwich Mean Time anyhow!

So is most of the Internet.

It's all listed in GMT (plus or minus some number of hours).

Be Cool!

Be Brittish!

Use GMT!!!

Interesting.....I say go with whatever you want Doan ;D

[DYRE]

GMT FTW!
Seriously, though, I can't even see the chat , so it doesn't really effect me.

[Doan the Nado]

Um... Reality was having that problem, too. You may need to empty your Cookies and Cache and refresh the page, I guess. I don't see why that would help, but it helped him.

Also, let me know what browser you are using. I have been testing everything on both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and believe it is working for Nash on Safari, but I can't make any guarantees about any other browsers.

Edit: I just temporarily experienced this problem a few minutes ago, but I found that closing the window and browsing back to the site fixed it. Refreshing should do the trick usually. It just seems like it's some glitch, either the browser is having trouble, or it might even be the server failing to make the proper connection. Speaking of the server, I wouldn't be surprised if they contact me soon to ask why I have so many processes that are running for minutes at a time .

[realitybites]

Im still having that trouble again, the chat isn't showing for me, I deleted my cache and my cookies, but nothing. Grr, this thing is weird..... your DoAn BoX is busted.

[Doan the Nado]

Okay, I don't know if this is what was causing all the problems, but I definitely fixed what was causing problems for me and Reality earlier.

First of all, there is a chat.html page which contains the last 50 messages to be posted to chat. Previously, at the top of this file, there was also important html information. That meant that every time a post was made, I opened up the file, saved the important info, threw out the oldest messages until it was down to 49, then printed the important info back to the file, along with the 49 messages, followed by the new message.

The problem with this is that I added another important line to the top of the the chat.html file, so that when someone posted, it threw out the line that introduced the body of the page. This is a bad thing, as the browser will not display anything if it thinks that it is part of the head of the document.

Once I realized the problem, I also realized the error of my approach. I moved all of the important stuff to a separate file, so that now all I have to do is throw out old lines and add new ones. Now there should never be a situation where important information gets deleted.