Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-4962933-20140826122905/@comment-2170536-20140826164310

The standard MediaWiki #time reports time values in UTC by default. You can change that with a simple argument, but as RansomTime points out, the whole point of a time stamp is for it to be consistent. If everyone stamped their signatures with their local time zones with no qualifiers, no one would know exactly when a particular message was left.

So, if you want your time stamp to show EDT (i.e. UTC-4), for instance, you can with the following code: -4 hours This results in 12:43,8/26/2014 (UTC-4).

In any case, make sure to label your time stamp with the time zone you are reporting, or else people will be (erroneously) thinking it is UTC. If you want something shorter you could use EDT, but that might not be immediately obvious to those outside North (and possibly South) America. The UTC offset is universal.

Note that you will have to manually update your signature when DST ends. And later MediaWiki specs have codes for displaying the time zone and offset, but Wikia doesn't appear to support them yet (hence the literal string).