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My site shows some information for certain time period. User has possibility to change his or her timezone and this affects the information's queries.

I have implemented some setting where user can set timezone (timeoffset) manually, get it from user's location or get from browser setting.

According to this post - https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/21433/17332 i pick nice idea to show list of times (not timezone) for manual case.

But I still don't decided what should I do with Daylight Savings Time. Come back to timezone? But in this case I have misunderstanding which timezone is correct for data extracted from user's location..

So I am looking for way to set correct time for user which take to consideration Daylight Savings Time. Does anybody know good examples of this?

Edit with improvement from comments.

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  • When you refer to Summer/Winter time, are you referring to Daylight Savings Time? Oct 31, 2012 at 12:15
  • @LaurenvanderVyver exactly! Daylight Savings Time is better term.
    – RredCat
    Oct 31, 2012 at 20:17

2 Answers 2

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The time zones include the time offset and Daylight Saving settings. Your application needs to know the time zone to function properly.

Since there are multiple time zone formats your users might know ( UNIX, Windows... ) it is always better to set the time zone based on the user location. Ask them for their country ( the majority are in one time zone ), regions ( state, province... ) if the country is not sufficient, and City for the unlucky few that live in states with multiple time zones.

If you have the address or GPS coordinates of your users, the above steps can be skipped.

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Make the user select a city. Just simply look at how timezone selection works when installing an operating system - grab some linux and try it out.

After that, follow the dls change in the timezone: it's fairly trivial that in case the user didn't change location, (s)he is interested in the time relative how the life goes by there, not one hour off.

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