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User-Friendly TimeZone List

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Hi all,
I am still, after quite some time, wrangling over the time zone system in my app. I have sorted out all the internal handling, however I am still uncertain as to what the best way to get the user to select their time zone is.

I was thinking of having users just select their timezones from a list which was populated with the contents of the query:
    select * from pg_timezone_names ;
which would look something like this.
    http://mrnaz.com/tztest.html

This however is problematic for a number of reasons:

1. The timezone list there isn't exactly user friendly, there are many Etc/* timezones there, as well as others that would be potentially confusing for users who are trying to select the timezone they are in. 2. If a timezone is removed from the list for whatever reason, then the system will be left with users who have selected a timezone that is no longer a valid choice in the list.

The ideal situation would be to maintain my own persistent list of timezones (the way Microsoft maintains their own user-friendly list that they use for Windows) that maps to the timezones embedded in the PG back end, but I haven't the resources to pull this off. Has anyone else worked on a mechanism to allow users to supply the timezone they are in, and if so, do you have any comments on how best to handle the apparently mutually exclusive problems of simplicity for users and accuracy in the back end?

At the simple end of the I can't just have users only select from a list going from GMT-12 to GMT+12. At the complex end of the scale I'd just give them the output from the list and any that are deprecated will result in the user reverting to UTC until they reset a new timezone.

Comments on this usability problem are appreciated,
- Naz.

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