Timezones Import Issue (Yes I read Barry's Post)

[Tiago]

Hi Guys,
I live in Australia, and as other users I had the problem on importing wrong time for FB events. In my case I’m importing events from FB pages I don’t own and do not have control off so I cannot clear facebook times. And I had to use the hard-coded solution suggested at http://freshlybakedwebsites.net/wordpress/events-calendar/facebook-timezone-confusion/

My question is how can two facebook event’s that are set to same time in the same city be imported with different offsets?

See screenshots to compare:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/25924507/temp-img/event-1.png
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/25924507/temp-img/event-2.png

1) I cannot safely set an offset in BEventsTimeCorrection() if I cant get a consistency in offset.
2) the offset is bigger than 12hs so BEventsTimeCorrection() does not like it

I’d like to thank for any hint on how to get around this 🙂

T.

[Barry]

Hi Tiago:

Bear with me here because timezone issues are always require a little mind-bending, so if I go off-beam just let me know.

My question is how can two facebook event’s that are set to same time in the same city be imported with different offsets?

It’s possible to set a timezone on FB for events so, if this is different for each event, then that might explain the discrepancy. I’m genuinely struggling to think of any other reason.

Do you guys practice daylight saving time or anything like that and are these events from two different FB accounts? Even if they belong to the same account it’s still possible that they were added using different timezones.

2) the offset is bigger than 12hs so BEventsTimeCorrection() does not like it

True, I’ll put my hands up and admit I didn’t quite anticipate this sort of extreme. Though I haven’t tested this (perhaps you have already?) you could possibly amend this line (in FBEventsTimeCorrection):

if ($this->hours < 0 or $this->hours > 12) return false;

To:

if ($this->hours < 0 or $this->hours > 24) return false;

And see what you can get away with. Again, I haven’t tested that out at all so it may not work as expected.

[Tiago]

Tiago: those are different FB Account which I do not administer and have no control of. Coolangattam QLD has no daylite savings and both Events are in Coolangatta. That said, we are the last suburb in Queensland and the state of NSW, right across the street is 1 hour ahead in Daylite Savings. But since all events are in Coolangatta in FB I cant see a reason for FB making a daylite mistake. see screenshots:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/25924507/temp-img/event-1.png
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/25924507/temp-img/event-2.png

Also changing the line bellow to a hire than 12 works.
if ($this->hours hours > 12) return false;

Just need to figure out why two events registered in FB with same time and city would give me different offsets.

Thanks a lot for your response Barry!
T.

[Barry]

Thanks first of all for confirming that a larger range of -/+ hours works with FBEventsTimeCorrection works – I’ll update that blog post to reflect this.

Just need to figure out why two events registered in FB with same time and city would give me different offsets.

So I do understand that you don’t control them and didn’t set the original events up on Facebook, but I suppose that’s sort of my point. Something I’ve seen in North America-related posts is one person/account having times that default to Pacific, and others that have been set explicitly to work on Mountain time or whatever.

And – could be mistaken here but I believe this *used* to be the case – for a while all event date/times defaulted to Pacific, as a sort of universal Facebook time, which caused some amount of confusion. So it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that a user setting or quirk of Facebook is behind the discrepancy.

[Author]

Posts