Support

It looks like you are confusing many different things.

First of all, Joomla's Global Configuration timezone setting only has to do with how Joomla tells PHP to parse dates and times. It has nothing to do with displaying them. The setting there must match whatever your server is using.

The Joomla setting that has to do with displaying dates is in your user profile. In the backend of the site click the person icon at the top right and click Edit Account on the popup menu. Click on the Basic Settings tab. Select your Time Zone. Click on the Save & Close button in the toolbar to apply these settings.

Regarding the off-line schedule, the time is always displayed in UTC and must always be entered in UTC. There is actually a simple reason to do that: different users with access to the configuration can have different time zones which, in turn, may be different than the server's timezone. The time has to be entered in an absolute format that's not affected by timezones. There were exactly three alternatives: UTC, UNIX timestamps (number of seconds since midnight January 1st, 1970 UTC), or Swatch Internet time. I believe that UTC is the easiest of them all. You know you're in LA therefore you know you have to add 7 hours to your schedule. If you want an off-line schedule from 10 pm (22:00) to 8 am (08:00) you get the following:

• 22 + 7 = 29. A day has 24 hours, therefore 29 - 24 = 5, ergo start time 05:00.
• 8 + 7 = 15. Ergo end time 15:00.

Also remember that this time math cannot happen correctly automatically, as you demonstrated with your ticket. If you still don't understand why: you never set the correct timezone in your user account. Therefore Joomla would understand your time preference as being UTC. Your solution is to honor your user's timezone settings for displaying and setting the away time. However, in this case you'd enter an away schedule 22:00 to 05:00 thinking it's in LA time but, in fact, it'd be 3 pm to 1 am LA time. Technically that would be correct because that's what you told Admin Tools and Joomla to do but not what you thought you told them to do. By always using UTC we remove that ambiguity. You, a human, can do simple math unambiguously. The computer has to rely on so many conflicting settings, some of which you obviously don't know, that the simple math becomes a complicated flowchart and might not end up doing what you think it should do (but hard logic says it'd be technically correct).

Sorry, I had missed that you set your user profile's timezone. I understood that you had only set the server timezone in Joomla's options. Well, these option names could be better named but I digress.

The blue message tries to convey a different message than the one you understood. The Away Schedule doesn't base its decisions on the One True Global Time™ because such a thing does not exist. It bases its decisions on information your server provides. Where your server is located, whether it runs an NTP daemon, whether the NTP daemon is correctly configured, whether PHP itself is set up with the correct timezone in its php.ini, whether PHP's correct timezone has been overridden in a user file (php.ini or .user.ini) and whether Joomla is set up with the correct time zone all have a say into whether what PHP reports as the current UTC time is correct or not. If it's not correct you're supposed to chase that issue down the line because there's nothing else we can do.

I am going to change the message BUT it's not going to be a massive block of text. Nobody will read a wall of text. I think the message should instead read "Away schedule times must be given in UTC. Your server reports that the current UTC time is XX:YY. If this doesn't look right please ask your host to check their PHP time zone settings."