Solved XenForo: future timestamps, and unexpected effects of clicks

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I first noticed the problem a few days ago. Not in the alerts drop-down, it was when posting a reply.

I checked my preferences, can't find anything wrong there.
 
Ah, that happens when local time of the post gets published before a thread on the server has a chance to translate that timestamp value and account for the timezone... This means that someone a few minutes to the East of UK (France or Egypt come to mind) posted those comments. Nothing to do with timezone preferences on your local PC, and everything to do with thread concurrency on the forums.freebsd.org host.

Edit: Technically speaking, those 3 closest posters are about 1 hour east of grahamperrin ...
 
The confusion from the temporal distortion you are experiencing is perfectly normal and the effect of using Firefox Quantum:

If you go and download Firefox Quantum right now, you’ll immediately notice the difference, accompanied by a feeling of mild euphoria.
*snip*
Our designers created a system that scales to more than just current hardware but lets us expand in the future.
*snip*
There’s more that could be said about all the amazing work that went into Quantum, or about some of the exciting stuff in the very near future, but at this point you should stop reading and download Firefox Quantum, because it will make you happy.

Firefox Quantum

Don't worry, be happy.
 
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Your last screenshot shows what I assume is your computer clock set at 4:07:58 BST on the left, but your forum timezone on the right is UTC.

BST=British Summer Time=UTC + 1 hour.

One of these is incorrect. My local timezone is CDT=Central Daylight Savings Time=UTC - 6 hours UTC - 5 hours. My local time is 1:01 AM, so the timestamp you see on this post should be 7:01 6:01 AM if you are in UTC, or 8:01 7:01 AM if you are really in BST time zone.

Edited to add: I don't see BST among the options for setting the forum timezone. You can still set it to one of the UTC+1 settings if you like, assuming that your actual time zone is presently at UTC+1. You'll probably need to change it again at the end of the summer. Otherwise, if you need to change your computer clock's FreeBSD time zone, you should be able to use tzsetup(8) to do that.

Edited again: This is confusing. I know that *I* am in "daylight savings time," but I'm not sure about how BST actually works-- in particular, I don't know if your particular region observes "daylight savings time," which is what the "BST" indicator under your clock clearly implies.

The forum settings make no mention of daylight savings time that I can see for any region, but I'm guessing that the symptoms you're seeing may be related to the way the forum is handling summer/daylight savings time in your particular region. UTC is somewhat unique, because it's defined in one way as "coordinated universal time" by telecommunications authorities, and in another way by the local civil authorities in your area. One way doesn't factor in summer time and the other way does. This makes an already complicated software problem even more complicated... More to the point, I'm in a daylight savings time zone too, but I'm not seeing any such symptoms as you've outlined here, so I'm guessing it might be related to your particularly unique timezone.
 
… because London (ignoring its association with UTC) does work.

17:45 to the left, 17:44 "A moment ago" to the right:

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Now I understand.

Probably a bug in XenForo, attempting (loosely speaking) presentation of live content in the midst of outdated (cached) content.

Here, for example, it's entirely unrelated to the BST/UTC discrepancy, it's around twenty-four hours in the future:

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It's a page that was probably loaded cached around twenty-four hours ago.

I'll mark this topic Solved with an assumption that the bug is beyond the control of server administrators.
 
It depends on the state of the cached content.

I'll edit, broaden, the title of this topic.

A comparable issue is when, for example, the page invites you to watch a topic that is already watched.

A click on the Watch button behaves as if the button was Unwatch, because the content was outdated:

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After escaping from the confirmation dialogue then simply reloading the page, the button appears as it should have initially appeared:

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