I don't know much about SMF, but isn't there a Time Offset in each user's profile?
Can't you use a bit of php to create a time based on the user's offset?? Maybe using the php date() function with the timezone parameters. If the Time Offset value that's already in the user's profile is not enough, can't you just create a new parameter for Timezone and use that in the php code???
I don't see what the problem is to create a local time feature for each user without the help of a third party flash app. I know a lot about php, flash and javascript programming, so please feel free to ask me any questions.
Maybe once you get the timezone of the user, you can use javascript to display a real-time clock
Thanks for the input atomicrabbit and I'm glad to have such technical advice. I know an amount of PHP, JS etc that I could fit in an eggcup and not much else, that said, it is enough to envisage how things could possibly be done.
You would think that this would be fairly straighforward and just needs a field hacked into the sidebar/avatar section with the appropriate function attached. But to date, in all the research I have done with this, it has never been done? These forums have a magnitude of modifications available and I have seen this mod requested for other forums other than SMF - still it has not been acheived (although I am not suggesting that someone has tried hard enough).
Buster posted this earlier:
I just tried an experiment with the posts template by adding $context['current_time'] to the avatar area.
It screwed the post alignments up and unfortunately only displays the time according to each logged user. Everyone will see the time differently according to their own timezone settings. It does have potential to work with some code changes. I am not sure I can do that myself either. I will check with someone that may though, and get back to you if you want to try it. ![Smiley :)](https://www.diasfora.co.uk/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
and I have faith that it really isn't a gimme if he has problems getting it to work.
Do you have Apache running locally? If so you can install 1.19 in your localhost and see if you can hack the template to get it to work. If you do it would be a very popular modification I bet and with an added paypal donation in the script, it might be worth your while having a go?
Thanks again AR and buster, and everyone for that matter who has contributed in one way or another.