New date entries in a topic appear like this in the corresponding notification mails:
Nächstes Freifunk Treffen Makers Inn (noch unbestätigt)
2024-04-18T16:00:00Z UTC→2024-04-18T20:00:00Z UTC
For the mail publication channel, this should be reformatted into a human-readable date information with respect to the current timezone (in this case: CET) of the discourse instance.
It should be in the timezone of the event and/or event creator
It should be more nicely formatted, ie instead of “2024-04-18T16:00:00Z UTC→2024-04-18T20:00:00Z UTC” it should read like “UTC 2024-04-18, 16:00-20:00”
I dont know the code here, but this is a possible disadvantage, I agree.
On the other had, we see the correct date in the visual calendar on top … Someone who knows the code, should comment on this …
Haven’t inspected the code but I presume that on the web, the date loads equally from DB to client and is parsed client side via js (which is an option you don’t have when you render content client side in a mail client)
switching to UTC was an improvement over not showing any timezone, or a very verbose situation where we might show 3 timezones for every date… but there still hasn’t been a follow-up to utilize a site/user timezone.
Even if it’s a few timezones away, many people can probably take a better guess when starting from a specific timezone rather than UTC.