Greetings Mark (and others reading this message):

Feel free to sign up for the Central Illinois Adobe User Group. All that is required is an adobe userid (free). Initially our meetings will be held in conjunction with the local WOW chapter (for example, the meeting on Feb. 26). Please contact me if you have any questions.

Actually, in my opinion, there should be a setting for timezone before one logs in. Yes, you can change it to Central Time after you login (you start at the inbox). I have reported this to Adobe and it is a known problem. I do understand they have someone working on it, but I do not know the priority.

An excellent question - regarding how to accomplish this (setting time zones for those not logged in). My mind may be a little muddled on a Saturday morning, but here is my 2 cents. I am certain others reading this thread will be able to offer improvements.

The main issue is when one lands on the individual group (for example Central Illinois Adobe User Group). Since the majority of visitors will likely be in central Illinois, they are not thinking Pacific Time zone. At the moment, I can think of three separate ways to accomplish changing the time zone. Without all the UML models and use case scenarios, here is what I was originally thinking...

There should be some sort of checkbox to indicate the default timezone for each user group. Leave it up to the group administrator whether to choose to set the timezone or not. However, if they so choose to set the timezone, an entry is posted in a field in a database for that specific user group. This entry would set the default timezone to that which the group administrator chose.

From a visitor perspective, when they select the appropriate group page the time zone would be adjusted for what the administrator had chosen. I suspect this could be done via a read of the database table. Perhaps one could set a cookie (I know not everyone likes this sort of technology) so the time zone would be somewhat permanent or this could be done every time someone visited (via a hit on the database). Hope this makes some sense.

The third way (besides databases and cookies) would be to do what sites like IBM.com do - namely, a reverse IP lookup for the Internet Service Provider location and set their pages to display in the language (and other local bits of information, such as time zone) for that visitor. This is probably overkill for our user groups.

Since several individuals have posted asking that this be changed to local time zone (without logging in), just how important is this to you? Please improve upon my comments above.

I more or less agree though I will stay away from being implemation specific. I'd expect that a timezone could be set at the group level setting. and if the user is logged in and has a different setting that would over ride the group setting.