What's the time?

[Mich the Tester]

So if I complain that the weather's inaccurate, they'll remove that too?

No, because the weather forecast is unlikely to be accurate. Only the location of any particular weather might be inaccurate. It's always snowing somewhere.

[NickFitz]

You show 'em GMT (or BST) and allow them to select their offset. Simples.
The weather shows me London unless I select my location. Same thing.

Which is where you enter into the whole problem of having to design a suitable user interface for the selection process, including a suitably prominent warning that, until they confirm their timezone offset, the clock may be inaccurate; and before you know where you are the clock has become the biggest and most complex thing on the page.

Then you have to implement it. Don't forget the case where the user has disabled cookies, so you can't make the timezone sticky and they have to be reminded on every visit. Also, the clock will become inaccurate again when they pack up and move from Lithuania to Canada; how are you going to warn them about that?

As so often with times and dates, problems that are simply stated are deceptively complex in implementation. The BBC are in fact correct, from a technical standpoint, in stating that it is impossible - as in, really impossible, not just hard - to solve the problem of making the clock accurate for all users under all circumstances.

[doodab]

BBC slammed for misleading viewers because its homepage clock is 'inaccurate' | Mail Online

DM link (sorry)

I'll bid 90 days. Any advances?

Somewhat ironic given that nearly every article on the daily mail homepage is inaccurate.

[Uncle Albert]

Just remove the ******* clock. That will take no time at all and will solve the problem.

Anyway, who the hell goes to the BBC to see what the time is?

[Mich the Tester]

Just remove the ******* clock. That will take no time at all and will solve the problem.

Anyway, who the hell goes to the BBC to see what the time is?

Dunno, it seems a lot of effort when you can type 'time' in google. Try it, guess what it does.

[mudskipper]

Which is where you enter into the whole problem of having to design a suitable user interface for the selection process, including a suitably prominent warning that, until they confirm their timezone offset, the clock may be inaccurate; and before you know where you are the clock has become the biggest and most complex thing on the page.

Then you have to implement it. Don't forget the case where the user has disabled cookies, so you can't make the timezone sticky and they have to be reminded on every visit. Also, the clock will become inaccurate again when they pack up and move from Lithuania to Canada; how are you going to warn them about that?

As so often with times and dates, problems that are simply stated are deceptively complex in implementation. The BBC are in fact correct, from a technical standpoint, in stating that it is impossible - as in, really impossible, not just hard - to solve the problem of making the clock accurate for all users under all circumstances.

The clock on the telly is inaccurate if I'm not in the UK.

[eek]

You've just fallen into the trap of failing to solve the problem, and in fact reproducing the original problem in a rather more complicated form. The whole point is that the system time can't be involved in any way, as it cannot be trusted. If a user has their clock set to a timezone offset several hours different from where they are, their locale set to a location several hours different in the other direction, and is accessing the Internet through a proxy server on the other side of the world from their location, you can't show them an accurate time. And as the complaint was not that the clock was inaccurate, but rather that it could be inaccurate due to relying on the system time, you're back at square one.

As precisely one person has complained, I don't understand why they don't just tell them to **** off. It's probably one of those morons who thinks the BBC is out to get them or something (of which there are a surprisingly large number on here). Useless twats

No you haven't thought that through. My proposal just overrides system time to ensure the time displayed is getting the time from a BBC server and working out the offset I can then use the system time to manage the clock without returning to the website every second to confirm thing.

Context is of course everything here. So surely the easiest solution is to ensure the time is correct compared to a BBC server and slap a large label of London, England directly underneath it.

Or scrap it with an explanation alongside the email address of the complainant.

[MarillionFan]

No you haven't thought that through. My proposal just overrides system time to ensure the time displayed is getting the time from a BBC server and working out the offset I can then use the system time to manage the clock without returning to the website every second to confirm thing.

Context is of course everything here. So surely the easiest solution is to ensure the time is correct compared to a BBC server and slap a large label of London, England directly underneath it.

Or scrap it with an explanation alongside the email address of the complainant.

Which is why Suity came back and said 100 days.

[ctdctd]

So if I complain that the news is inaccurate, they'll remove that too?

FTFY

[mudskipper]

Gosh.

Sommat else I didn't know.

Indeedy. Perfectly simple. If one wanted to big up the job, one could click the detected location and give the user the option to change it.