Time zones and languages
From Wiki Gonzalez
Q. What's the deal with time zones and languages?
A. It's unclear. Expression Engine, the content management package that powers Baseball Think Factory, allows registered users to set their preferred time zone and preferred language. However, this customizability, like most of Expression Engine's other features, sucks.
Time zones
As far as Primates can tell, the language and time zone that appear on BTF are not "your" customized selections, but those of the last user to submit a comment. Most often, that user is an English speaker from one of the United States' four time zones, but not always. Since Primates hail from all over the globe, the timestamps on comments can appear fairly nonsensical, jumping around from refresh to refresh.
The best way to determine the current BTF time zone is to look at the time on the most recent post on the Hot topics bar, and subtract it from your local time.
In cases where BTF has gone a full hour without anyone posting (usually early weekend or holiday mornings in North America's Eastern time zone), this method fails. If you know the location of the Primate responsible for the most recent post, this may also help determine the current time zone. If the most recent comment was submitted on a blog other than the one you're reading (e.g. Game Chatter or Sox Therapy instead of Baseball Primer), this Hot Topics strategy is useless.
Languages
As for languages, navigation links (first page, last page, etc.) and the names of months can be localized to these languages: Dutch, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Finnish. As described earlier, the language used in the BTF interface is dependent on the user who last submitted a comment. Most of the time it's English, but sometimes it isn't.
Most Primates have become accustomed to all these languages (except for Finnish) and can understand and use them when they appear on the site.
BTF pages are always encoded as UTF-8, a Unicode encoding; this allows Primates to write and read comments in almost any language. However, Expression Editor's foreign language text for the user interface is emitted in Latin-1 (Western European), a non-Unicode encoding. This coding mismatch often garbles non-English text beyond repair or understanding.
(Actually, Latin-1 and UTF-8 are the exact same character range. I think the character mismatch comes either from the HTTP response headers not getting the encoding right, or possible from a meta element in the HTML with a content attribute value of "encoding" that's overriding the UTF-8. Since the behavior varies from browser to browser it's almost certainly one of those things. It would be super easy to check, but I'm busy right now editing the Wiki.)
It says something about Baseball Think Factory that its users are willing to withstand such ludicrous inconveniences to use it.
Umpires ask MLB Commissioner Bud Selig to explain Expression Engine's strange behavior.
![[Main Page]](/btfwiki/skins/common/images/wiki.png)