Tech Forum Archive

Repeating Events thru Daylight Savings Time not working as before

14 postsstarted by mjones11 6,410 viewsoriginal topic

mjones11
New Member
#1
I am trying to schedule repeating events for the whole 2023 calendar, but the event time is being adjusted for Daylight Savings Time. This has never happened before in previous years. If the time is 3:00 PM, the time should show 3:00 PM on the calendar no matter if it is Daylight Savings Time or not. Please advise.
russellhltn
Community Administrator
#2
It's complex. Worldwide, there's a number of buildings shared by units that operate in different time zones. As such, the calendar system needs to be "world time" aware.

There's always been an ongoing problem with DST. I'm not sure what the intended result is.

Note that the website is getting it's instruction for time zones from your browser, which in turn gets it from the computer. There's a possibility for DST information to be lost and only a fixed reference to GMT to be sent to the website.

For starters, I'd suggest going into settings in the calendar and making sure the time zone in there is set correctly.
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davidpscoville
New Member
#3
Given your explanation of the worldwide needs, I suggest you add an option to the calendaring program to ignore daylight savings time. The timezone information for my browser and computer is correct. The problem with the current calendar program, for example, is if I schedule a Sunday 2:30pm event that repeats twice a month throughout the year, during the daylight savings time interval, the meeting time changes to 1:30pm. This is not how meeting schedules work! This currently requires that I go back and manually change the 1:30pm times back to 2:30pm, which greatly reduces the benefit of the repeat option. It also adds an enormous amount of work when entering all the next year's calendaring events.
russellhltn
Community Administrator
#4
davidpscoville wrote: Sun Aug 28, 2022 4:40 pm Given your explanation of the worldwide needs, I suggest you add an option to the calendaring program to ignore daylight savings time.
That's the problem. Apparently, all the events are recorded properly in the database, but the display process applies a fixed offset according to the current zone/DST instead of applying DST rules on a per-event basis. Hopefully the updated system will process it correctly.
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davidpscoville
New Member
#5
Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say, "all the events are recorded properly in the database." Are the times recorded as an offset to GMT? If yes, for repeated events that span the beginning or end of daylight savings time, is the offset to GMT in the database adjusted by an hour when transitioning into our out of daylight savings time?
russellhltn
Community Administrator
#6
davidpscoville wrote: Mon Aug 29, 2022 1:46 pm Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say, "all the events are recorded properly in the database." Are the times recorded as an offset to GMT?
Either GMT or some other standard.
davidpscoville wrote: Mon Aug 29, 2022 1:46 pmIf yes, for repeated events that span the beginning or end of daylight savings time, is the offset to GMT in the database adjusted by an hour when transitioning into our out of daylight savings time?
That's been my observation. I believe the database is correct as once you transitioned into the same DST/Standard designation as the event in question, it goes to the proper time. At least it did in the past. I'm not sure what's going on that a full day event goes to three days. I can understand 2, but 3 sounds like a compounding of two bugs or something.
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davidpscoville
New Member
#7
I tried an experiment. I created a weekly repeating event starting at 1pm from October 18 through November 15 of 2022, and everything worked fine. When daylight savings time ended, the meeting time remained at 1pm. In case this might be caused by the proximity of the dates from today, I set up another weekly repeating event at 1pm during the same interval in 2021, and it worked fine as well. The meeting time stayed the same through the end of daylight savings time.

Then I created the same weekly repeating event at 1pm from October 18 through November 15 of 2023, so the only difference is the year. This time, the event time changed to 2pm when daylight savings time ended. This 2pm time change also existed for the same weekly repeating event over the same interval in 2024.

This suggests to me that the current calendar software is working fine. The problem seems to be the way the 2023 and beyond calendar database was set up. Is there another explanation for this behavior? Of course, my timezone and browser settings were constant throughout the experiment.
russellhltn
Community Administrator
#8
Interesting. However, I think the plan is to stick with the current software, bugs and all, until the new software rolls out. That's supposed to be September, but planned dates slip more often than not.

But if you're curious about how it was recorded in the database, you might want to change your time zone to a non-DST zone and see what happens. I see Windows 10 offers some "Coordinated time" zones. Or, you could go with Arizona time zone.
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mrbitsch
Member
#9
davidpscoville wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 12:36 pm I tried an experiment. I created a weekly repeating event starting at 1pm from October 18 through November 15 of 2022, and everything worked fine. When daylight savings time ended, the meeting time remained at 1pm. In case this might be caused by the proximity of the dates from today, I set up another weekly repeating event at 1pm during the same interval in 2021, and it worked fine as well. The meeting time stayed the same through the end of daylight savings time.

Then I created the same weekly repeating event at 1pm from October 18 through November 15 of 2023, so the only difference is the year. This time, the event time changed to 2pm when daylight savings time ended. This 2pm time change also existed for the same weekly repeating event over the same interval in 2024.

This suggests to me that the current calendar software is working fine. The problem seems to be the way the 2023 and beyond calendar database was set up. Is there another explanation for this behavior? Of course, my timezone and browser settings were constant throughout the experiment.
We're seeing this as well, and is causing a lot of confusion over why times are shifted in 2023.
russellhltn wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 4:30 pm Interesting. However, I think the plan is to stick with the current software, bugs and all, until the new software rolls out. That's supposed to be September, but planned dates slip more often than not.
So has the new software been rolled out and this bug is still present, or has the new software not been rolled out yet?

The cynic in me would say it's just a clever ploy to convince folks to use other calendaring (and email, because of the AOL Yahoo issue) systems. :D Only half kidding there as that seems to be exactly what happened with the broadcast system and Zoom.
russellhltn
Community Administrator
#10
mrbitsch wrote: Mon Nov 07, 2022 11:41 am So has the new software been rolled out and this bug is still present, or has the new software not been rolled out yet?
The current schedule is November 15th. And there will be an outage as the data is copied over.
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KWLDS
New Member
#11
Its November 26, and the problem is continuing. Thanks for working on this.
russellhltn
Community Administrator
#12
KWLDS wrote: Sat Nov 26, 2022 6:14 pm Its November 26, and the problem is continuing. Thanks for working on this.
What exactly are you seeing? You may want to edit the event and resave it.
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KWLDS
New Member
#13
Thank you for your help. I am new and positng and didnt see your response. I am currious if there is a way to unsubscribe from some calendars. I had subcribed to all calendars in our stake trying to look for conflicts. Then the new version came out and I have now way of unsubscribing. It looks like they are permanent. Perhaps this is a change comming?
Thanks for your help.
martyriker
Member
#14
You can choose which calendars you subscribe to.

On the Church Calendar Website, click the gear, and then Sync.
Then create a Custom Synced Calendar Group, and you will be able to use the new URL created when you've chosen the calendars you want visibility to.