30W Time Zone Rule

Announced Saturday, May 24, 2008 03:34 UTC

There’s been a small change to the algorithm to deal with time zones. This change does not affect anyone in North/South America (excluding eastern Greenland), does not affect Saturday meetup times anywhere, and does not change any currently known upcoming meeting times. The change:

For every location east of Longitude -30 (Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia), 
use the Dow opening from the previous day — even if a new one becomes available 
partway through the day.

Put differently (the same functionally for everywhere except islands in the mid-Atlantic):

Consider any Dow openings published after noon local time 
to have occurred on the next day.

This is necessary to deal with time zone problems. For a lot of Europe, the Wednesday Dow opening was learned near sundown Wednesday, which meant they couldn’t use it to get to daytime meetups. For east Asia, they had to visit weekday locations the next day. A bunch of solutions were discussed, and I decided this was the cleanest.

The map program has been updated with this rule. The first coordinates that will be affected by it are for Tuesday, May 27, 2008. Again, this does not affect anyone in the Americas.

Implementations

Authors of existing implementations are encouraged to update them before 12:00 UTC on Monday, May 26 so that your users in the easternmost time zones can have a smooth transition. Once updated, add {{30w compliant|yes=1}} to the Implementations page.

Announcement Templates

• In affected areas (east of -30° longitude), please add {{pre30w}} to old expedition pages from May 21-23, 2008. (May 24-26 are unaffected due to the weekend and the Dow holiday for Memorial Day.)
• You may also use {{30w}} to post an alert to your local graticule page.

See also

• Randall's official blag post on the issue
• Archived discussion on the issue