We’ve just launched a new feature that will make Birdstack a little cozier for some of you. You may have noticed that dates on comments, forum posts, activity feeds, and the like were all in Universal Time. For those who live outside Europe and western Africa, this made it hard to tell when things actually happened.
But now you can specify your local time zone on your account settings page (accessible through the dashboard). This will convert all system dates to your time zone, making it easier to tell when things like comments and activity feed items were actually posted.
And for those of you who live in places that use daylight saving time, these changes will be made automatically for you!
Note that user-entered times on observations and trips will NOT change based on your time zone selection. This is intentional. If somebody records an observation made at 6 p.m. in Sydney, you don’t want to see it presented as having occurred 2:00 a.m., you want to know what time of day the observer was experiencing the bird.
Another new option is to see dates shown in either month-day or day-month format. By default, all dates are shown as 4 February 2009. But now you can choose to show the month first: February 4, 2009.
Similarly, we’ve introduced an option to format times in 12-hour format (11:00 PM instead of the default 23:00).
Again, these new options are available on your account settings page, accessible via your dashboard.
Enjoy!