My website has regularly user-scheduled events.  Right now we are using our timezone EDT (or EST) as the base timezone for all events on the site.  I feel like this is either 1) wrong, or 2) very confusing. Currently, we have users all over the US and Europe.Is the proper method to localize times based on the clients' time zone? use UTC/GMT?Thanks
What is the proper time zone to display times for events online?
ux
Honestly, this is one issue that is frequently seen when having a website used by multiple time-zones.  There is a long-list of ways to overcome the battle.  To summarize badp, there's a lot of contributing factors as-to how different timezones are processed.Most websites opt into one of two different solutions to address this problem:1) Store anything involving a date as UTC in the database... and allow a user-defined setting for users on your website to pick what timezone they're in... or do some geo-ip-lookup magic to find out where in the world they are and find the appropriate time-zone... and then every time you display the date... make sure to call whatever function needed for localization.  Nearly every programming language has some method for displaying dates using a specified timezone.  You would also have to do this in reverse for users inserting dates. (take local time & convert back to UTC for DB storage)  This is probably the most common approach.  This would also save you a lot of time from trying to re-inventing the wheel.  As far as anonymous visitors go... you can either A) stick with EST/EDT (using built-in function calls for displaying as appropriate) or B) revert to the Geo-IP-Lookup thing & pick a timezone based on an educated guess.  It's also a good idea to always specify the time-zone you're displaying the date/time in.  i.e. never say 12:00 ... make sure it says 12:00 EDTor 2) Follow stackexchange's model (and many others) of displaying the difference between now & when the post was created.  i.e. instead of posted on x date ... you would do x hours ago or x days x hours ago etc... or for future dates... in 6 days 14 hours...  This is quickly becoming more common for many situations... but isn't as ideal for calendar-type schedules.Of course... you can still adopt some kind of hybrid of the two... and you may need to even go one step further and store dates as utc... but also store a specific time-zone for an event.  Ultimately, the decision is yours.