Comment by chrismonsanto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrismonsanto | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I know what you mean. I run a large gaming website. For tournaments, two or more players have to agree on a time to meet and play.

A dialog goes something like this: Player A: I live in X time zone and 3pm works for me. Player B: OK, I'm in EST, let me see what time that is for me. ... OK, that works!

And then Player A and Player B miss each other, because Player B wasn't aware that his current time zone was EDT, not EST.

Even if both players convert to UTC first it doesn't work, because EST -> UTC and EDT -> UTC yield different times. And it's difficult to help them out with site-mandated time tools, because players like to coordinate over IRC, Twitter, GChat, ...

I'm sure there's a good way to fix this problem, I just feel like I shouldn't have to.

EDIT: I just saw the Eve online comment. Unfortunately that doesn't work quite as well for us, as the game isn't a program that's always running on the player's computers. It's more in the spirit of trying to coordinate chess matches.

Seems like this could be solved on your end with code. Just add a sprinkle of Javascript to detect what timezone they're in and either show them the UCT time or maybe set up a button saying something like "Suggest Time" where the player who clicks it sees the time for their own timezone but the UCT time is sent across so that the other player sees it converted to their own time.

This is a _community_, not a web app. Maybe the two words mean the same thing to people nowadays, but it didn't back in ~1999, when this community was formed--5 years before the website was formed. It's not the case that the website is the central hub for everything. As I said, players sometimes prefer coordinating over IRC or other mediums. And in some cases, there isn't one central place to play matches.

You can certainly mitigate the problem by encouraging people to use a web app to coordinate. Maybe there is an incentive structure that would help drive adoption. But whether or not people use the web app or not, they are still apart of the community and we have to serve them. I don't necessarily decide who is in and who is out.

Anyway, the point of my post wasn't to complain that there aren't workarounds. There are. I just think we as a society _shouldn't have to workaround DST_, and I wanted to add my lend my (largely insignificant) story to the cause.

You could create an IRC bot or client script that recognizes times entered in the channel and converts them to UTC plus a couple of common zones.

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