Add support for Etc/UTC timezone

[PaulB]

Currently, there's no locale-invariant timezone. The available UTC-ish timezones are subject to change and discrepancies such as DST; for example, Europe/London is currently in DST, so it's UTC+1 instead of UTC.

This isn't great for global forums. We'd like to have a culture-agnostic, government-agnostic timezone as the default, and the generally-accepted standard for that is Etc/UTC. It's guaranteed not to change significantly at the whim of governments; any changes are by international consensus. None of the timezones supported by XenForo fulfill those requirements.

Current UTC-ish timezones supported by XenForo:

• Europe/London: Subject to DST; as of writing, this is actually UTC+1.
• Africa/Casablanca: Subject to DST; as of writing, this is actually UTC+1.
• Atlantic/Reykjavik: Currently locked to UTC year-round, but if Iceland ever changes timezones or implements DST, this will change. There's no guarantee that it will continue to track UTC.

 

[PaulB]

I'm giving this another push, as it seems to have been largely forgotten. It's not something that can be easily changed by an add-on as the offsets are hard-coded in both JavaScript and PHP, but it's immensely useful for teams that are trying to coordinate activity across timezones. I'm hoping it would be a very small change if handled by the XenForo team.

We're now in the time of year when the default timezone labelled UTC in XenForo isn't actually UTC.

While we're at it, I noticed that some places use Europe/London as the default timezone when Etc/UTC should probably be used instead. Perhaps that qualifies as a bug? For example, in AbstractImporter:

public function convertToDateCriteria($unixTime, $userTimeZone = 0, $timeZone = 'Europe/London')

At the moment, that's only used by the vBulletin importer, so it makes sense. However, that seems like it would be incorrect for other forum software, no?

 

[StarArmy]

Excellent suggestion. This would be very useful for military forums that operate on universal "Zulu" time.