I know, it’s not all that uncommon a practice, but—Turtle Wax has its headquarters in the Chicago area, and most of the participants in this forum seem to be in the USA, so it has occurred to me occasionally to wonder why the forum’s “system time” is set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT or UTC).

Standard internet protocol on most servers.

TexHill got it right It’s easier on the Internet to reference GMT/UTC than “attempt” to cater to everyone’s time zone(s)

Similar story, I reinstalled Windows, and it defaulted to Pacific Standard time.......I was like huh?  why?  lol.  Probably because Microsoft is based in that time zone?

But yea, UTC/GMT is “universal”......though most sites have the options to change the time zone offset to a custom value.....

It makes sense for system times to be UTC—in fact, I remember lo, these many years ago with my first ISP, the files I downloaded were all time-stamped with UTC time, even though the ISP was a local company.  It was kind of disconcerting sometimes to see “files from the future” in the directory listings on my PC
:-D

However, time stamps in E-mail headers often are not UTC.  I assume they reflect the time zone of the mail server.

BTW, in “Your Control Panel” there is an item called “Localization settings.” It can be set to any time zone.  But what does it affect?

yea, email is a whole nother creature Simply because the “file” (the email) gets sent from one server to the next, and each server leaves their “date stamp” in the headers, some will use UTC/GMT, but have seen others (many years of spam reporting to knujon and spamcop....) that simply list the (presumably) local time (of the mail server).

Greenwich Mean Time is the standard time to the world. Since it is a forum open to the whole world, it’s necessary to set its time to it.