Language and time zone in member profile

G'day! I am considering running an old tournament scenario of mine as a playtest exercise for my fellow beta testers, and in doing so it occurred to me that it might be useful to to have members' time-zones as a standard item in their profiles. Roll20 should make latitude unimportant, but longitude still has teeth! Since some members are bound to be polyglot, and since there are still several thousand living languages in the world, "languages" might be a field for multiple user-designated searchable tags. And for the same sorts of reasons "preferred games" should be tags too. — Brett

i hadn't thought of that. now that we're dealing with people from differing time zones we should be aware of that. this is probably a feature we'll see after the beta ends.

For time zones - if the players are in different time zones, it would be cool to see the current time for that person by mousing over their video feed...

I've been thinking about this, and I'm of the opinion that it is not a good idea to use manually-set offsets from UTC, because they will have to be changed manually for daylight saving, which will be a pest and fraught with oversight and error. Allowing people to specify their time zone in a text field will have problems too. Most obviously it will mean everyone having to perform look-ups and calculations all the time. Also there is the issue that what people colloquially call their time zone might not be what other people are able to look up in standard references. So I think the best thing would be one of those facilities such as you use in setting your time zone in the system of your computer, where you use [a map and] a drop-down list to pick your time zone from the IANA time zone database. That can be stored in a standard format and made the basis of automatic daylight saving time calculation, and permits no confusion over the colloquial and official usage of e.g. "EST".

There is no need to ask the user for his time zone. Just ask his browser: <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_gettimezoneoffset.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_gettimezoneoffset.asp</a>

As a fixed offset from UTC, that would have to be refreshed from time to time to deal with DST changes, say, on every log-in. Unlike an IANA time-zone, it would not allow long-term scheduling (though of course players could do that explicitly). For privacy reasons, some users would probably want an opt-out. Sounds good.