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Snapshot of the chat image

I made this screenshot a few minutes ago. My time zone is Central Europe, so my current time is 16:39 (CEST or UTC+2).

However, (based on the orange vertical bar) it seems that the Stack Overflow website thinks that my current time is around 13:30 (3 hours earlier).

What's going on here?

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1 Answer 1

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Everything on Stack Exchange is based on UTC time.

In your screenshot where it says 12:00, the bar for 12:00 is above the 1 in 12:00, so the time it is indicating as current is 14:30, which matches up with it being 16:30 at UTC+2.

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Now I know :) –  Šime Vidas May 19 '11 at 14:54
Huh. I would have assumed that the times were centered with respect to the bar (i.e. bar above the colons) if you'd asked me this out of the blue. Not that that really matters in any way whatsoever. –  Pops May 19 '11 at 14:57
@PopularDemand, look at it in terms of the very left of the graph at 0:00. –  Rebecca Chernoff May 19 '11 at 15:01
The live chat room is an exception; there (and only there) we show the user's local time. –  balpha May 19 '11 at 15:43
sure, that'd be reasonable if I actually thought about it. But first-glance, gut-reaction, immediate/instinctive reaction? "Things are centered." (Again, not that that really matters in any way whatsoever.) –  Pops May 19 '11 at 17:13

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