Date Added uses sometimes the time zone of the observation sometimes not

Bug Reports
1

In my opinion the time zone of the observation should be irrelevant for the timestamp when I add the observation. Yesterday I added observations made in Germany, India, and Iran. Instead of telling me for all those observations the hour in CET (where I live) I see CET, IST, and IRST.

2

Can you please share screenshots of what you’re seeing, and URLs of the observations? The bug reports template asks for those things because it’s very difficult to investigate bugs without specific details.

Here are instructions for how to take a screenshot on several types of devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org

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3

inat1
inat11920Ă—1080 338 KB

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4

Because the screenshot shows only the usage of the time zone of the observation as Date Added I add a screenshot where the Date Added is always my home timezone (CET) for observations made elsewhere in the world.

inat2
inat21920Ă—1080 418 KB

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5

Here’s what I think is happening. I don’t think it’s a bug, we just changed the way we added time zones to observations the other week.

Many of your observations have no time entry (which is totally fine). eg https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/73186191, which was uploaded last year:

image

In those cases, I think we would use your account’s time zone as the “time zone” - CET - for the observation, which you can see at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/73186191.json

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image814Ă—84 5.98 KB

And that time zone is what’s displayed on the “Added” column in Explore’s list view. Which is why you see CET in that screenshot.

Now, thought, we use the coordinates of the observation to determine its time zone, even if it has no time. So for https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/113023758, which you just uploaded, the observation’s time zone is in Iranian Standard Time: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/113023758.json

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image778Ă—64 3.3 KB

You could make a case for whether we should be displaying the Added time in the observation’s time zone, but it’s not a bug, it’s designed that way. What changed was how we deal with time zones, espeically for observations without any time information filled out.

6

Upload is a complete different event than observation. You have date and time of the upload and search for a timezone to show the (date and) time on the screen. A recourse to the observation timezone seems very arbitrarily and is not necessary because when I go from “Your observations” to the observation itself I find as “Submitted:” the correct timezone. Is there a difference between Added and Submitted?