✔ Flow Flow timestamps are wrong
Completed by Ryan R.
- Assigned to
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Ryan R.
- Notes
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There is a setting in Flow Flow to "Date Format" but that is set to WordPress (which is set to detroit time), so I'm not sure what the issue is.
I just got this email:
At 12:50 pm this afternoon, Dan posted a tweet from the Diocese of Scranton Twitter page.It showed up on the new website….but instead of SAYING it posted at 12:50 PM when it was actually posted…..it says it posted at 5:50 PM today (which hasn’t even happened yet)Just wanted to bring to your attention to see if there is a time-zone issue or something.Eric
Flow-Flow
Actual Twitter
Flow flow documentation/forums suggest that the date/time is based on Server time. I checked all reasonable avenues here...
1) Server time set to America/New_York ( Mon Feb 11 11:20:15 EST 2019 )
2) Website Wordpress set to America/Detroit ( Mon Feb 11 11:20:15 EST 2019)
3) Twitter user settings set to GMT -05:00 Eastern Time (US & Canada).
I ran tests with my own Twitter account using Flow flow and changed my own Twitter timezone, as well as changing the Wordpress site timezone. All combinations yielded the same time results currently experienced (5 hours shifted ahead).
Changing the Date Format in Flow Flow between Classic & Wordpress had no effect on the time, other than how it was displayed. Ironically, using the "Short" Date Format did make an impact. For example, the tweet from 6:07am this morning shows as posted "5h ago".
I tracked this tweet down in the Flow Flow database cache (wped_ff_posts), which has a "posted on" timestamp of 1549883225. If you convert this to human readable, you'll see that timestamp is 11:07am GMT, and locally that represents 6:07am.
So we can surmise that Flow Flow is handling the time two different ways somewhere in its coding. When using Classic or Wordpress format, it's not accounting for server time zone as indicated. When using Short, it does.