Hi everyone,

we have just changed how timezones are handled throughout the site. Until now, we used a cookie to render times in your timezones on the server. This, over the time, caused all sorts of issues, starting with endless reload loops on the PS4 and some other browsers and ending in a lot of hacks to handle DST changes. Also, this prevents us from caching HTML output, as it depends on each user's preferences.

On top of that, when the site was moved to a new server, we also switched from running in CET/CEST (UTC+1/2) to using UTC. The many hacks throught the site to compensate for the original timezone lead to some problems (like new run times being off by an hour), which motivated us to finally do something about it.

The old cookie-based approach was replaced by outputting HTML5 <time> tags and using JavaScript to convert those into the browser's timezone. There are two minor downsides to this approach:

¤ On large pages with lots of times (like the forums index), this takes a few milliseconds and the page is delayed by a moment. In most cases you won't notice it. ¤ Users without JavaScript enabled will not see localized times anymore, but rather UTC values. As many things on speedrun.com depend on JavaScript, we don't think this will affect many users.

A note to marathon managers: We noticed that times seem off by 1-2 hours for newer marathons (with our schedule being the only source for the start time, it's hard to verify if it's correct ;-)). Please check your schedules and make sure the start time is correct. Please note that you need to configure it in UTC, not -- as earlier -- in your local timezone.