17:37 <isd> Something I've observed with my znc port is that all the playback timestamps are in UTC. Is there a way to detect/query the user's timezone?

17:41 <isd> capnp schema in the sandstorm repo suggest not.

17:44 <isd> I guess I can probably do this with javascript.

17:44 <isd> standard http mechansims and such.

17:48 <isd> Can find ways of getting the utc offset, but the zone is more complex. Also, tz data varies so frequently...

17:50 <dwrensha_> hm, yeah arguably "preferred timezone" should be part of Sandstorm's profile data for a user

17:51 <isd> Having irc timestamps played back in not-my-timezone is rather disorienting.

17:53 <dwrensha_> detecting the timezone client-side should work in many (most?) cases

17:54 <TimMc> Should it be the profile data, or detected from the browser?

17:54 <TimMc> err... what you said

17:55 <TimMc> isd: Having an explicit setting would be nice in any case, though; I prefer my IRC timestamps in UTC even though my (main) desktop clock is Eastern Time.

18:14 <isd> Having done a bit of searching, I'm finding ways of getting the UTC offset from the browser, but not the *timezone,* so it's going to do weird stuff around DST, and wrangling that without being told which thing it's supposed to be is... complicated.

18:15 <TimMc> interesting

18:15 <isd> TimMc: do you mean you'd want the timestamps do display something different that the times you seee in your browser?

18:16 <isd> Short-term I might add a setting to the app anyway.

18:16 <TimMc> Different than the times I see in applications, yes.

18:16 <TimMc> "in the browser" is ambiguous here

18:25 <isd> Opened an issue: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/issues/2900

18:40 <zarvox> isd: new Date().getTimezoneOffset() gives browser timezone offset in minutes, FWIW

18:42 <isd> zarvox: yeah, but it doesn't give you info re: DST, for example.

18:51 <dwrensha_> what specifically are you worried about re DST?

18:56 <isd> dwrensha_: So, in my case, I'll actually need to configure the znc daemon somehow (probably by fiddling with the /etc/localtime symlink (which will probably have to go through something in /var)). So I won't necessarily be able to query the time zone when the user re-connects to the bouncer. So if all I had was the UTC offset, I can't detect when/if it should shift.

18:56 <isd> It would be easier if I was only going to use this when the user was looking at the web ui

20:07 <zarvox> isd: hmmm, yeah. I suppose you could try comparing the offset for new Date() to the offset for ~six months ago? but that's clearly hax

20:08 <isd> It's more complicated than that. E.g. GMT switches off of daylight savings time about a week before US/Eastern does.

20:08 <isd> You could do a binary search until you got within < 1 day.

20:08 <zarvox> Yeah, and it's not guaranteed to be valid for six months.

20:09 <isd> but yeah, it's a hell of a hack.

20:09 <isd> And you'd have to find two points, not one.

20:09 <zarvox> But really, trying to infer what time it "really" is for a user seems like doing the Wrong Thing, and better would be for all timestamps to be stored as UTC and converted to whatever the client's timezone (or user-configured override) is

20:09 <zarvox> unclear if ZNC's architecture allows for that though

20:17 <isd> Yeah. This sort of thing is why I decided to try to write my own IRC bouncer. Experience has convinced me that leveraging existing protocol support is the better side trade-off.

20:18 <isd> *side of that

20:19 <isd> hence having since abandoned IRC Idler.

20:21 <isd> Looks like there is a ZNC config setting that does what I want, it's just a question of how to collect the right value.

20:21 <isd> (So no symlink nonsense necessary)

20:32 <isd> I think what I'm going to do short term is just have a setting for it on the web dashboard for the app, rather than trying to detect it.

20:33 <isd> Maybe if/when sandstorm let's me query this, I'll use that to choose a default.

20:57 <dwrensha_> powerbox project idea: port supermute to sandstorm

20:57 <dwrensha_> https://twitter.com/tinysubversions/status/845014698147770368

21:08 <mrdomino> What does the sandstorm backend do for persistent storage? I assume I want to get from SandstormApi -> mongo -- is that so? how?