Website not closed at the correct time

Hi,

If you go to Settings > General, is the time set on UTC-6?

It should look like this:
Universal time (UTC) is 2019-04-10 19:12:44. Local time is 2019-04-10 13:12:44.

Guido

Hi Guido,

Thanks for the reply!

It was set on UTC-5, actually, which would be correct, since we’re observing Daylight Savings Time now.

I changed it to Chicago now, which should be the same thing.

It looks like this:
Universal time (UTC) is 2019-04-12 03:01:02. Local time is 2019-04-11 22:01:02.

I don’t see how to attached a pic, or I’d attach a screenshot…

Hi,

My plugin uses the Local Time, so in your example this one: 2019-04-11 22:01:02

So if this was a sunday the site should be offline from 2019-04-11 00:00:00 – 23:59:59

Can you please check this upcoming sunday again? With this UTC time format.

Guido

Checking this any other day should work as well, of course..

So you can do a quick test tomorrow, close your site for example:
Saturday at 00:10 am
Saturday at 12:10 pm

The result should be that it’s closed at both times above. If not, there’s something strange going on with the time settings of your site or my plugin.

Guido

Guido,

I’ve been checking the past few Sundays, and right now (6:21AM Central Time), it is still on Sabbath mode, both on my mobile and desktop computer. I refreshed the page several times.

Last week it came on around 7-8am. The week before it was 11:30AM.

Our website does not get many visitors. Is it possible it takes a few visitors for the website to “wake up” from Sabbath mode?

Right now (5pm central time, Monday), the website is still in Sabbath mode. I checked it on desktop and mobile, and from other IP addresses, and they’re all the same problem.

Hi Nick,

This is very strange, the structure of my plugin is very simple and uses the time from your dashboard. That’s it. But maybe there’s a problem with certain time formats, don’t know. So is there a way you give me a temp admin login so I can take a look at it myself?

If this is possible, how can I reach you? Via the website in your first post?

Guido

Hi again,

Did found some info about current_time( 'timestamp' ); that I use, please check this post. Maybe that’s causing this unexpected behaviour.

Guido

Hi,

Are you able to make a change to my plugin file?

Go to the editor and select my plugin and open file “vswc”.

Look for these 2 strings:

$vswc_time = current_time( 'timestamp' );
$vswc_date = date('w', $vswc_time);

Remove them and change into:

$vswc_date = current_time( 'w' );

I think this does the trick. Apparently the “timestamp” part doesn’t always work properly (anymore).

Guido

Guido,

Thank you for the replies.

I was able to modify the code of your plug-in. I found the strings, and changed them just as you described.

To test it, I changed the “Closed” day to today (Tuesday). When I refresh the page on my laptop, it enters Website Closed mode, just as it should.

On my mobile phone however, the website remained available (not in Closed mode), even after closing the internet browser several times, and refreshing multiple times, on multiple different phones. I restarted my phone. I also forced my phone to use the Desktop site, and also tried using 4G data instead of my home Wi-Fi. I left Closed enabled for 30 minutes while I tried these various things, and my phone still did not enter Closed mode, no matter what I did.

All this while, the Desktop version behaved just as it should.

Do you have any other ideas of what to try? Does the mobile version of the website/plug-in behave differently, or get it’s time stamp from somewhere else?

Hi Nick,

No, my plugin is “very simple”… only few lines of code. In your case it uses 1 single string to determine the date/time:

$vswc_date = current_time( 'w' );

The current_time() is a native WordPress feature that gets the local time of your WP install. And the “w” is part of a native PHP feature that returns the day (in numeric format, such as 0 for Sunday, 1 for Monday, etc.).

So there must be a conflict with your install or perhaps another plugin of your website.

By the way, are you using a caching plugin? Perhaps that causes unexpected behaviour?

Guido

I don’t think we are using a caching plug-in. But in the process of building our website, we did install a handful of plug-ins that are not being used anymore. I’ll try to get those cleaned up.

But for now, here’s the list of plug-ins that are active on our site. Do you see any that may cause a problem?

Advanced Excerpt
Advanced Post Excerpt
Akismet Anti-Spam — plan to keep this one
Contact Widgets
Elementor — plan to keep this one
Force Login — plan to keep
GoDaddy Email Marketing
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights — plan to keep
Gravity Forms
MailChimp for WordPress — plan to keep?
Ninja Forms
Very Simple Website Closed ??
WordPress Importer
WP Subscribe
WP101 Video Tutorials

Hi,

For now I don’t notice a plugin that could cause a conflict with mine.

My local time is 12:31pm and your website is closed over here. So that’s good.

I have played a lot with the time-settings in dashboard, but website is always closed and open as it should be.

You told me it’s not working properly at your phone, can you also try on a tablet, such as an iPad?

Guido

Hi @nickvandewaerdt

Any news on this?

Guido