Wed Jan 03, 2018 1:20 am
I just posted something in the thread on Southwest deferring the 737 MAX 7. When the page reloaded immediately after posting, I noticed there was a reply right after mine.
So, I was curious. I hovered my mouse over the field that notes the posting date/time, and it says I posted it today at 19:09. The clock on my computer (which is corroborated by my cell phone) said 19:06 (I'm in US Central time, and my account and computer settings both have the correct time zone, so that is not the issue). The post that was below mine was showing as being posted at 19:11.
So, it seems as if the forum host server isn't properly noting the time the post was submitted. If it was relying on the user's computer to get a time stamp (which wouldn't make sense anyway), then it should have shown my post as being made at 19:06. Instead, it was showing three minutes in the future. Meanwhile, it recorded someone else's post as being at least five minutes in the future. Really, it was probably more than that, unless the next poster happened to click submit at exactly the same time I did.
Regardless, the source of the problem is definitely in how the server applies a timestamp to the post. It doesn't really have anything to do with time zones, or editing, or even with how the posts are sorted (because they are correctly sorted according to timestamp, it's the timestamps themselves that are incorrect).