Fiverr system not covering BST timezone.

[sannansyed]

I was coordinating with a client of mine for a meeting that was supposed to be at 11 AM their time (In the UK). I messaged them at 11 AM their time when it said Local time: Apr 15, 2024, 11:00 AM on my client's inbox page (Right below where it says the username of the client in a chat). My client did not arrive for a meeting, so I told them that we could postpone it.

One hour later, my client arrived and told me that it is currently 11 AM at their place, and now, the Fiverr website is saying "Local time: Apr 15, 2024, 12:00 PM". I looked up if the UK (England in this case) has multiple time zones, and that's where I learned about something called British Summer Time (BST).

During summers, the time in the UK is 1 hour ahead of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) timezone. However, this does not reflect on the FIverr chats. It seems that it always displays time in GMT in regards to people based in England.

Suggestion: Fiverr should implement a more accurate timezone detection system and make sure that the time shown is accurate with the season of the year and the locale.

Technical nitty-gritty and suggestions:
Additionally, as a programmer, I suggest that they retrieve the user's time from the client-side. I.e., use the frontend JavaScript to simply generate the current time and stream it to the server. What I think they are doing currently is that they get the IP address of the client on the server side, using some in-house or third-party solution to detect a timezone for it and then they return an initial time to the clients. Or on second thought, they most likely just get the timezone at sign-up and keep it that until the user changes it explicitly, which would be even worse and defeat the whole point of showing the user's timezone to others in chat.

If either of these are truly the case, then it seems like re-inventing the wheel for no apparent reason and it looks to be prone to bugs. On the other hand, client-side JavaScript by default gets an accurate time directly from the machine of the client with just one line of code.

One concern with the suggested approach would be that the user might try (I can't see why, but let's just say they might) to fake their timezone as they have control over the client side, but... they can already do that by using a proxy or VPN and sending the request from a different IP. If the reason for not going with this approach is this concern, then I don't see how this can be avoided even with the current system.

Looking forward to the Fiverr team doing something about this and ideas/thoughts from the Fiverr community.
Kind regards.
Sannan.

Edited April 15 by sannansyed

[uk1000]

2 hours ago, sannansyed said:

Additionally, as a programmer, I suggest that they retrieve the user's time from the client-side. I.e., use the frontend JavaScript to simply generate the current time and stream it to the server.

Isn't a problem with that that the client's device might not be on or they might have no connection to it? Plus if it was constantly streaming it couldn't take bandwidth? And it might occasionally have the wrong time on their device. If the buyer has turned their device(s) off their other methods (eg. using the geolocation/IP address/saved country settings (though some countries have >1 timezone) could work (eg. it could still say the time in the buyer's timezone even if the buyer's device(s) were turned off).

Edited April 15 by uk1000

[emmaki]

To be fair, not even Britain respects BST except for the 1 day of the year when the sun darkens our fair isle's skies with its rude interruption of the scheduled rain.

[coerdelion]

To be fair, Fiverr has always been an hour out for as long as I've been here.  Sign up for a webinar, supposed to start at 2.00 BST and it will start at 3.00 BST.  Same problem with GMT. 

Fiverr just doesn't recognise that the UK actually *has* its own time zone, but thinks it should have the same one as France.

 

[emmaki]

6 minutes ago, coerdelion said:

Fiverr just doesn't recognise that the UK actually *has* its own time zone, but thinks it should have the same one as France.

I can't believe Fiverr supports those French ruffians - everyone knows that the French are perennially up to no good and not to be trusted. Come to think of it, I'm now starting to understand Fiverr a little more. Is Fiverr actually a French company disguised as an Israeli company? 

[sannansyed]

On 4/15/2024 at 7:43 PM, uk1000 said:

Isn't a problem with that that the client's device might not be on or they might have no connection to it? Plus if it was constantly streaming it couldn't take bandwidth? And it might occasionally have the wrong time on their device. If the buyer has turned their device(s) off their other methods (eg. using the geolocation/IP address/saved country settings (though some countries have >1 timezone) could work (eg. it could still say the time in the buyer's timezone even if the buyer's device(s) were turned off).

You do have a fair point there that I did not think of when writing the post regarding the users being offline. But I think your suggestion of falling back to their method makes sense. About bandwidth, however, I believe the amount should be negligible since it is just one small string broadcasted over a socket connection.

As for the wrong time being on the user's device, I think that is a rare occurrence. I mean, who willingly allows there to be the wrong time on a device they use professionally?

Anyways, these are just some additional things I have mentioned in support of implementing this using the native APIs instead of doing their own in-house solution, as it is clearly more prone to bugs. I am okay with anything, really, as long as it works 😂.

[sannansyed]

On 4/15/2024 at 9:47 PM, coerdelion said:

To be fair, Fiverr has always been an hour out for as long as I've been here.  Sign up for a webinar, supposed to start at 2.00 BST and it will start at 3.00 BST.  Same problem with GMT. 

Fiverr just doesn't recognise that the UK actually *has* its own time zone, but thinks it should have the same one as France.

 

For some weird reason, that's contrary to what I have experienced. I quite frequently deal with clients from the UK and the reason I posted this question was because my previous idea was that my UK client's time is 5 hours behind mine (As I am in Pakistan), so I would schedule accordingly. Now due to this incident, I learned that the time in the UK is 4 hours behind mine during summer. This incident did not happen to me before and I always scheduled my meetings with the 5-hour assumption and arrived on time. I do not know the geographical reasons this happens but I have a feeling this is also a problem w.r.t. other parts of the globe, and Fiverr needs to fix this. I don't know about you but I don't wanna end up like the dude in one of these recent viral twitter posts because Fiverr decided to screw up what time it shows for my clients 💀 (See attached. I hope Ahmed does well):

Right now, when I search "current time UK" on Google, it tells me the time and the timezone, which is GMT+1 (BST), but previously, it used to show GMT. So it looks like Google is able to get the time correctly, and I am sure that the native browser (or even backend) APIs should be able to do so as well (Didn't test as of right now).

[coerdelion]

Wow!  That was rude. 

That confirms it: Fiverr's broken clock isn't even right twice a day ...

[sannansyed]

For context, the dude in the Twitter doesn't have anything to do with Fiverr, I was talking about Fiverr in my own case (or another seller's) if something like that happens. The dude in the Tweet is talking about a recruiter from what it seems.

[sannansyed]

Just now, coerdelion said:

Wow!  That was rude. 

That confirms it: Fiverr's broken clock isn't even right twice a day ...

Yeah, sorry about the misunderstanding in my reply, I am really sleepy right now so I didn't read what I typed... 🤦‍♂️ Please read my most recent message for clarification that the attached image has nothing to do with Fiverr 😅.

[sannansyed]

21 minutes ago, dibakarbiswa141 said:

 Fiverr displays timings as GMT instead of BST, making meeting scheduling difficult. You suggested a more accurate timezone identification method that receives the user's time from the client-side using JavaScript. This method may enhance accuracy and eliminate issues compared to the present system, which presumably uses IP-based timezone detection or static settings. Users can manipulate their timezone with proxies or VPNs, despite concerns. You propose a more sophisticated and user-friendly Fiverr time management tool

Off-topic from this issue, I think there should be another post concerning AI-generated posts and how they should be avoided similar to StackOverflow:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-generative-ai-e-g-chatgpt-is-banned?cb=1

[imagination7413]

4 hours ago, sannansyed said:

there should be another post concerning AI-generated posts and how they should be avoided

It's already listed in the forum rules that they count as plagiarism, so if you see forum posts that are AI generated without the source cited, absolutely feel free to report them. 

[sannansyed]

It looks like Fiverr silently fixed this : D. The local time of my client is shown correctly now (4 hours difference between BST and GMT+5).