The point of this post is reasonably insignificant, but it is important, and it relates to a feature that was long overdue for an update.
Until now, we've resolved user location and timezone based on an IP address, but this method has become less and less reliable over time. The integrated calendar feature associated with every form will display a resolved timezone (in order to show your available booking slots) but it will occasionally return an invalid location if the IP address resolves incorrectly. We now retrieve the timezone and UTC offset directly from the users' browser and then save these values to session and a cookie. It is this known value that determines what (default) timezone is applied to any calendar form. Since we've used this method we've seen 100% accuracy over several thousand page views.
The plugin update that'll push on Tuesday includes this new feature (and over 100 others, almost all of which are more important than what we've described).
The system is currently working through the millions of Web records and migrating data into Xena. Given that we've throttled the migration to only 200k records per hour we're still nearly a full day from completion. Once done, we'll mirror the older system until the end of the month before shutting the old 'Pixel' method down completely.
