On 5 Jul 2015, at 23:26 , Karsten Loesing karsten@torproject.org wrote:
Also, there seems to be 24 rows with white background, then 24 with light grey bg. If the search returns eg. 30 results, then only the last 6 would be in grey, and users could potentially think there's something special about those. I'd use a much smaller number, eg. 5 at most, so it's obvious that the background is just there for aesthetic reasons.
Ah, the highlighted rows contain results for the searched date, whereas the other rows are for the previous and next date. The idea is to always search +/- 1 day in order not to rely on users figuring out timezones correctly. Maybe the highlighting is too implicit though. I'll leave it out. It's not worth explaining to users what the highlighting is about, and it's particularly not worth confusing users with it.
"The two extreme time zones on Earth (both in the mid Pacific) differ by 26 hours." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_time_offsets
So can we possibly change this to +/- 26 hours? (or, perhaps, 30 hours, just in case some region adjusts its timezone another hour or two out?)
For the sake of those in Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga and the eastern New Zealand islands on one side, and the US Minor Outlying Islands on the other.
But no timezone can be more than -12 or +14 hours away from UTC, so I think we're good by including the previous and next 24 hours of any given date. That being said, I'm not good at timezones, so it's quite possible that my math is wrong.
When you wrote +/- 24 hours, I assumed a 48 hour period centred on the current UTC time, not a 72 hour period centred on midday on the current UTC date. (My mistake, 72 hours is what you describe in the interface.)
In more detail, UTC -12/+14 can't ever fall outside date(UTC) -24/+48: * date() (or floor(), if you prefer) will only ever subtract up to 24 hours, therefore * date(UTC) -24/+48 ranges from UTC -24/+48 to UTC -48/+24, therefore * date(UTC) -24/+48 always lies within UTC -24/+24, and * UTC -12/+14 always lies within UTC -24/+24, so * UTC -12/+14 always lies within date(UTC) -24/+48.
Of course, people can always mess up their timezone conversions, assume the local/UTC time in the logs is correct, or be uncertain about when an event actually happened.
There's not much we can do about that. But guaranteed +/- 10 hour fuzzy matching in any results from any timezone is a pretty good start. (And there's even greater leeway if your timezone is close to UTC, or the time you're searching for is close to midday UTC.)
Tim
Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)
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