Jump to content

IM Time stamps


You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 2474 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

After a long time of wondering just why my offline IMs either take several hours to reach me or never arrive, I discovered yesterday that the problem is with Yahoo.  A change of email address and offlines arrived within minutes.  Success.

But now I have noticed a difference in the IM time stamp that appears before the message.  I have made several tests in the last half an hour with different avatars and the issue is the same.  I send an offline IM and the time is correctly shown at the start of the IM - 9:30, for example.  However, when the IM reaches the email account a few minutes later, the time stamp on the IM is one hour earlier, 8:30 using my example.

Is this a normal thing, is there a setting I have missed?  My own time zone is GMT, my computer clock and the SL clock are accurate, and so are the time stamps in nearby chat and IMs.  The "change" seems to come after an offline is sent.  Does anyone have any ideas?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My timezone is far from GMT, but the offline messages are all prefixed by a UTC timestamp -- which kinda makes sense because the service has no sure way of knowing anybody's timezone when they're not logged in. And it makes sense that an IM sender (from a logged-in account) would see their local timestamp.* The mystery is how, in your case, it can be stamped earlier by an hour. It's as if GMT did Daylight Saving Time, but it doesn't.

*I'm supposing that "I send an offline IM and the time is correctly shown at the start of the IM" refers to how it looks to a logged-in IM sender, but maybe you mean something else.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You read correctly, yes.  I tested by sending an IM to my alt.  Inworld, the time stand at the start of the IM line was correct and matched my computer time - in the example I gave, 9:30am  But when it reached my alt's email account, the time stamp was 8:30am.  When I logged my alt in, the IM was there waiting for him and 9:30am was the time of the sent IM.  I just felt it a little odd that the time stamp loses an exact hour between SL and the email server 2 minutes later.

The daylight saving time is interesting, here we call it Summer Time and the clocks did go forward by an hour a few months ago - and will go back an hour in a few months time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Shayne Hesten said:

The daylight saving time is interesting, here we call it Summer Time and the clocks did go forward by an hour a few months ago - and will go back an hour in a few months time.

There's your answer.  When the IMs are sent, they are using true UTC time without any daylight savings / summer time adjustments.  So during your Summer Time you are one hour ahead of true UTC.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 2474 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...