Time Zone in URL

Quixotica

Okay, let me preface this by saying that I know this is a very, very minor thing that most J-Novel members have probably not even noticed. With that said...

When I'm on the main page, the URL for the site includes "tz=America/Toronto" at the end. Toronto is right. America is not. Toronto is not in America (North America yes, America no). As a Canadian, and I hope with your understanding that for the last two years our sovereignty has been regularly threatened by the US President, this is more than just an irritation or an eyesore.

It may seem like a very minor quibble to most Americans, but I think many Americans don't quite realize just how much the "51st state", "Governor Trudeau/Carney", "Lake America" rhetoric has many Canadians hackles up (this is without even delving into the other political factors but I am trying to post this neutrally without making it overly emotional). Toronto is not in America. We are not Americans. I would like to see the time zone in the URL adjusted if it is at all possible.

Five possible alterations are:

"tz=Canada/Toronto" - changing the name of the country;
"tz=Americas/Toronto" - the 's' makes a big difference, changing it from one country to two continents;
"tz=NorthAmerica/Toronto" - a longer change, continent specific, possible means alterations for users from South American countries as well;
"tz=EST" - probably the most politically neutral option, and maybe the simplest fix. Get rid of the country and city, just make it the time zone. Maybe more difficult geographically as some provinces and states begin dropping daylight savings time;
Just get rid of it entirely. The old site worked perfectly well without needing the timezone in the home page's URL.

I am not a programmer; I do not know if this would be an easy change, a difficult one, or even an impossible one if it is because of a third-party service. Again, I recognize that it is a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, and something most people would probably just shrug over. But I do at the very least want to bring it to your attention as an issue of concern to me, other Canadians, and presumably people from other countries as well (is it "tz=America/MexicoCity" or "tz=Mexico/MexicoCity" as one example; if the former it is something affecting multiple countries. If the latter there is no reason for Canadian locations to be classified as 'America' when other countries are not).

rsog412

The IANA time zone database uses "America/*" to refer to the American continents (North, South, and Central America).

E.g:

MX	+1924-09909	America/Mexico_City	Central Mexico

However, I don't see any IANA entry for "America/Ontario," so JNC is using some supplemental data source beyond just the IANA (or I'm reading the IANA tables wrong), but whatever that other entity is is probably following the precedent set by IANA. I doubt that JNC is maintaining their own database of timezone regions, so it still probably isn't something they can change, though.

(Edit to explain a bit) JNC is likely relying on a third party for their time zones. To do those lookups, JNC needs to send a string that exactly matches the representation that the time zone provider uses. That time zone provider seems to have aligned their standard to the format used by the IANA, which means that if JNC were to start sending Canada/Toronto, the time zone provider would fail to find any matching location, so the website wouldn't know what time zone to display for you.

IMO (as a programmer), they could probably re-write the home page so that it uses your computer's local time to display things without needing to ever send your time zone to the server, but doing that costs programmer time, and I don't think JNC has very many programmers on staff.

The cheapest solution (while still addressing the political tensions) would probably be to rewrite it so that the timezone string gets shoved into a request body or somewhere where the user doesn't see it.

endoftheline

Looks like a standard time zone database name. I also did a quick websearch, and they're probably getting the timezone from Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone.

There do appear to be deprecated identifiers with specific country names (e.g., Brazil, Canada, Mexico, US), but unless the browser provides that identifier, J-Novel.club is unlikely to use it

And America/Toronto is the canonical timezone identifier, at least according to Wikipedia.

Quixotica

Thank you both for the quick replies and the detailed explanations. They were very informative and I understand how it works better now.