It's December 7th, but still in the afternoon. I'm not done voting, and, at this juncture, all I can do is vote for best in show. What happened? The rules say that we have until the "evening" of December 7th to cast our votes before voting for best in show. I'm quite bummed about this....

@dave, did I read something wrong?

I think the timezone it is set to is not a US Timezone.

That's probably the reason ...I was busy all day yesterday, so I couldn't get to finishing it up.

I was still trying to vote yesterday late afternoon and I was caught off guard too, voting was over on the 6. for me and had switched over to Best of Show. I think I need to do some reading what exactly UTC is.

Ok here it is, hmmm, according to this, UTC is 5 hours ahead of me near New York City, not 24 hours plus.
https://www.timeanddate.com/wo...
What am I missing?

No, the voting ended earlier than advertised. The quote was "You have until the evening of December 7th to review the pictures and cast your votes."

The server is set to UTC time. The category voting actually ended on December 6, 11:59:59 pm UTC time. It wouldn't have been "the evening of December 7th" in any time zone, not even in New Zealand.

The "Best of Show" voting started at December 7, 12:00:00 am UTC. That means that almost half of the "48 hour" voting time for "Best of Show" is over, but it hasn't even been advertised in the Gardening News yet.

@Dave @Trish @Zuzu

So, Ursula, I'm in your time zone. Even though I can't attest to what actual time the category voting stopped, 12:00am IS a wee bit short of 'the evening of' the same day.....no matter the time zone.

"the evening of" really can't be as definitive as 12:00am, so I was wondering what IS the actual, globally acceptable cut-off time between day and evening and would sometime before near 2:30pm have been correct for my time zone in the first place?

Dana, I don't remember the precise time, but it was late afternoon yesterday, on the 6. when the category voting stopped for me.
But according to that link I gave, I should have had time to 7pm today, right? The "evening of" is a bit vague, in retrospect.

Lesson, next time be a bit faster on the ball, I guess.

I cross posted with some of y'all so here's what we need to know.

I think we just need a definitive date/time in UTC that voting for Best of Show will end. Then we can all convert it to our own date / time.

....and for the category voting deadline. 🙂

Just wish I had the entire "defined" time to finish my category voting. I had 4 1/2 hours, plus, to finish today, but I couldn't

Dana, I suggest that you just move forward and cast your votes for Best of Show.

I have no idea what UTC time is-- perhaps an easy fix would be a clear warning that the deadlines are in UTC time, with a link to a calculator to figure out what that means for your personal time zone. I believe I read that there are 40 time zones worldwide, but almost 200 variations when one accounts for daylight savings and such.

tx_flower_child said:Dana, I suggest that you just move forward and cast your votes for Best of Show.

Already did, but still disappointed

This kind of thing is why I always try to add a clock everywhere there is anything that relies on a specific thing starting or ending. With UTC it can get conjfusing.

Best of Show judging was set to start on Friday December 7th but that would mean actually starting around 6:00pm Thursday.

The final winners are revealed on Sunday which will actually be Saturday at 6:00pm CT.

@Dave
In this instance, the issue has nothing to do with confusion over UTC time. I understand time zones and don't find it confusing.

What caused the problem was the quote of "You have until the evening of December 7th to review the pictures and cast your votes." from this page,
https://garden.org/ideas/view/...

The inclusion of the word "evening" implies that the category voting ends on December 7th at 11:59:59 pm UTC time rather than at the start of that day.

It looks like I was the one confused by UTC time when I wrote the text for the announcement.

Thank you Dave! I do appreciate your comment a lot!

Thanks, Dave. I guess even "Super-Dave" has his kryptonite.
As you know, many people using the seed-swap feature had issues figuring out the time zones when dates and times were in UTC. When you adjusted the seed-swap pages to display in the time zone that members had set in their garden.org preferences, it really made a world of difference. Perhaps you could do something similar for contests and such?

(On a side note, my spell-check tried to correct "kryptonite" to "peritonitis"! Wishing you a healthy peritoneum, Dave! )

Thanks for admitting your "Oops!", Dave. I am another who only got to vote for a little over half the categories (which means I missed out on seeing a good portion of the wonderful photos). However, I honestly did not have time to do a bit more than what I did in the time allotted, so the outcome was the same, either way...
Next year, I'll be RETIRED, so I'm not missing out on anything, Lord willing!

I purposely skipped some categories because I knew that I would be incapable of voting in them. It's hard enough to vote for the Best of Show. And it's probably about time to see the winners. Or not. Just saw the correction.