More cities and GMT-style options in time zone selection

[deepad]

Title:
More cities and GMT-style options in time zone selection

Area:
posting

Summary:
The drop-down options right now to set your time zone offer an extremely limited number of Continent/City options to choose from. This should be increased and diversified to accomodate users from all parts of the world.

Description:
So in changing my time zone to get GMT + 5:30, I discovered that the only option I had was to select "Asia/Kolkata". No mention of Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore or any of the other big cities, and worse, no GMT option.

This requires people not living in the US to have to look up which of the small and randomly chosen list of cities their location matches in the time zone department.

So I would suggest that the system either be changed to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), or else if the present Continent/City one remains an option, make it Continent/Country for all nations that have one time zone. Or if Continent/City must be kept, add to the number of cities represented.

Poll #4509 More cities and GMT-style options in time zone selection

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 64

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
52 (81.2%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
8 (12.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
4 (6.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[quillori]

I think that would be a good compromise, and probably actually easier on the user than either having an endless list of places to read through to find yours, or having to figure out which of the listed cities is in your time zone. The only problem I can see is with daylight saving. Actually, thinking about it, is the current set up done off the tz database? That would explain why those particular places. Hmm... I'd still prefer GMT offset, in part because I travel so much it's easier than constantly trying to figure out where I am on the tz database list, but it would be a pain to set up a GMT style option to do automatic daylight saving adjustments - you'd need a first list of the (I think) 42 offsets in current use, and then, if you picked one of the options that includes places with daylight saving, a second list to identify whether that applies to you or not, which would probably have to be a version of the relevant bit of the tz database anyway. Perhaps a better plan would be to have two options? Either pick your place off the tz database list (perhaps, if there's a problem with people wondering why their nearest city wasn't included, with a link to an article about it, so people know how the particular places came to be picked?), or input your GMT offset, but in the latter case any adjustment for daylight saving will have to be done manually. [ETA I mean, manually by the individual user, when they're changing all their other clocks, not that someone at DW should be expected to try to figure it out.] Personally, I'd really, really prefer the GMT option, but I can see, thinking about it, why it might not be the best for other people.