Planned outage time zone conversion

WaniKani Bugs & Errors
1

Not a big deal, but I noticed the following banner giving a heads-up for a planned site outage:

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That text is:

WaniKani will be inaccessible for up to 15 minutes starting on August 7 at 15:00 PST (August 7 at 22:00 UTC)

What appears to be incorrect is the seven hour difference between 15:00 and 22:00 (if the intended time zones are indeed PST and UTC).

PST is UTC - 08:00
Current daylight saving time PDT is UTC - 07:00

Maybe the intent is to show the time in PDT rather than in PST. Or maybe the conversion is off (if in fact the intent is to show the outage start time in PST rather than in PDT).

What’s needed is to identify when exactly the outage is supposed to begin and which time zone to communicate that in (either PST or PDT), and based on that, figure out the proper conversion to UTC.

If I’ve done the math correctly, either the message should show PDT as the time zone instead of PST (if the plan is to be offline starting at 15:00 PDT), or perhaps the message should show 14:00 PST (if the plan is to be offline starting at 22:00 UTC), or whatever.

4 Likes
2

It’s likely just the very common thing where people do not bother with the “DT” of the timezones. For the vast majority of people they don’t even know it changes to “DT” and they will exclusively use “ST” even during Daylight Saving Time. For a website however it’s better to be accurate so they should probably change it to “PDT”. Remember to also send reports like this to hello@wanikani.com.

6 Likes
3

Thanks! Just saw your email too, I’ll report back to the engineers

Update: Should be fixed now

4 Likes
4

I’m wondering if these announcements could just use JavaScript to show the time in the respective user’s time as well. From my experience that’s not too difficult to implement but could be helpful to many users.

4 Likes
5

Looks good, thanks…