We have threads set to auto-publish once a week in several categories. Right now, we have people in different time zones who are responsible to publish in several of those categories. When they set a thread to publish on a particular day, the default time is midnight, but it’s the midnight of the time zone they are in. This becomes an issue when the person forgets to alter the publishing time for their time zone to coincide with the ‘forum’ time’ in order to synchronize all the threads to publish at the same time.
My question then is—is there a single forum setting that can make all threads publish according to ‘forum time’ instead of the time zone set on the profile of the person setting the auto-publish? Alternatively, if a person sets their profile to the ‘forum time’ time zone, and sets the auto-publish times for their thread, will the publish times remain as ‘forum time’ when they change their profile back to their native zone, or will those thread times revert?
We’re thrilled by the fix that make the auto-published threads take on the auto-close of the areas they’re moved to (Thanks again devs!). It’s made a big difference, but the initial creation of threads for auto-publish is still a lengthy set up and we’re still trying to reduce the amount of time and effort being put in to set these threads up more if possible. To be able to just set the date and have the default time synchronized would help.
I hope you understand what I’m asking. If not, I will try to make it clearer.
There is no such setting in core Discourse, I’m afraid! Any timer a user sets is relative to their system time, so changing the timezone in a user’s preferences will have no effect on when the topic is published. You would need to develop a plugin to achieve what you are looking for. Feel free to make a posting in our #marketplace if you are interested in hiring a developer.
Do you know if , assuming I set my personal time to say 0GMT and post threads for auto publish, then revert my system time to -5GMT afterwards will the threads I posted remain on 0GMT?
It looks like it. I did a quick test, setting my system time several hours ahead. After refreshing the page, the options in the timer respected my system’s new timezone. I set the timer for a date/time 3 minutes ahead of my current (manually changed) system time. When I switched back to my real timezone, the timer was correctly showing 3 minutes until expiring.
Feel free to experiment and see if you get the results you are looking for!