Ah, thanks luc - I did notice the board was set to 'CA' but it was the only option in the drop down, d'oh! :-)

You can change the way the date is displayed, get those parameters from config-default.php and put them in config.php and tweak them to your liking:

$Configuration['Garden']['DefaultDateFormat'] = 'F j, Y';
$Configuration['Garden']['DefaultDayFormat'] = 'F j';
$Configuration['Garden']['DefaultYearFormat'] = 'F Y';
$Configuration['Garden']['DefaultTimeFormat'] = 'g:ia';

Whatever you like.
Check php documentation. http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

If you're running your own server, you could change the default timezone too.

In bootstrap.php, you could change :
date_default_timezone_set('Canada/Saskatchewan');

I don't know where it should normally be set, as Garden tries to access it before (ini_get('date.timezone')), maybe php.ini

I suspect there's a command you could run to fix the posts, but it might not happen automatically as I don't know if MySQL stores timezone data, it probably just converts it into UTC. Anyway, yes, the time zone should match one of these: http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php and you should have it set already in your php.ini file, look for "date.timezone". Only if it's not set will it use Canada/Saskatchewan or whatever. I would suggest setting it, if possible, so that all your hosted sites know the local time zone. (In fact, PHP 5.3+ will print a warning if neither date.timezone or date_default_timezone_set is set.)

Yep, it's server-side only. You can check its value (and see all kinds of stuff about your configuration) by running phpinfo(). Just search for "timezone" in your browser.

Well, you could comment out the if statement for ini_get('date.timezone') in bootstrap.php, then change the date_default_timezone_set line to reflect the timezone you want: http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

I think we've also identified a missing feature of Vanilla-- a timezone screen that shows the PHP timezone by default but allows overriding via a config param.

logout/log back in.
The javascript for displaying date is processed then. (maybe it puts something in the cookie, don't know)

@luc @blizeH - When you sign out & in it uses javascript to get your timezone and saves it to your preferences in the user table. It uses this to figure out the diff from the server time and display the info for you correctly. Strange that you didn't have the appropriate time to begin with. But if you ever lose it, signing in and out always fixes the problem.

@Mark ah and that clarifies why you can't set the timezone in Vanilla. I wonder how it handles daylight-savings transitions, you might have to logout and back in again?

Well, short of calculating DST in JS, I suppose you could just send along the value the server thinks is the current time for the user, and have JS on the browser check if that's correct. Only if it's not correct, then, would the browser ping the server saying so. If the entire forum were AJAX like Gmail, then I could see the browser's JavaScript storing the offset permanently and then checking occasionally against the browser's reported time to ensure it's correctness.

How does Vanilla handle the time offset for those without JS? I can't remember right now ... but I imagine it just uses PHP's time zones, right? Would be awesome to use some kind of MaxMind/Geo IP product to locate where the IP address is, though I'm probably dreaming and it's overkill for just those without JS.