Time zone?

Hopefully this isn’t a horribly foolish question, but I’m having a hard time with the data on SOTAwatch. When I pull up the Spots page they all seem to be tagged UTC, but the Alerts page shows alerts at times that would be in the past UTC but upcoming Pacific. But it seems logical they’d all be UTC. Are they all UTC and I’m just engaging in some wishful thinking?

Always UTC

Everything is UTC.

I’ve just spotted myself and it’s 0006 BST. BST is 1hr ahead of UTC and so the spot has come up at 2306 which is correct. You don’t get to select the time on a spot, you issue a spot and the webserver fills in the time.

Alerts should be in UTC as well. There is no way for the website to know if the time you type is correct, it assumes you know what you are doing. So it is possible someone may forget and type their local time and not UTC. Worse, you need to consider where the dateline is. So for people a long way from UTC such as JA/VK/HL/KH6 you not only need to add or subtract many hours to get UTC but you make have to add or subtract 1 from the date.

People get used to their local adjustments, so UK people know to subtract 0 in the Winter and 1 in the Summer to get UTC. People in Western Europe know they subtract 1 in the Winter and 2 in the Summer.

So back to your alerts, either someone has mistakenly typed their local time or you are misreading the display. Can you point to a particular alert that seems wrong?

Okay. That makes a lot more sense than someone activating a summit near a major mountain at 7 PM. Just wishful thinking and misunderstanding the point of the Alerts page, then. Thankee.