Over the weekend we were hard at work making a few improvements to Swap-bot’s hosting infrastructure. With the improvements, we made a few small, but important changes.

First, we decided to move to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, also know as Greenwich Mean Time) as the official time zone of Swap-bot. Prior to this change, we used EST and EDT, but since we are a community with members all over the world, we needed to use a time zone that all of us could more easily understand. UTC does not spring forward or fall back, it is constant. With this change, we added an official Swap-bot HQ clock to the upper right corner of the page. If you are ever unsure of the time in Swap-bot land, look no further.

Screen Shot 2014-06-08 at 7.52.58 PM

Most of us are a few hours removed from the UTC time zone, which will require some pre-planning and thoughtfulness when swapping. Swap sign ups will still close at midnight on the sign up deadline, but it will now be midnight in the UTC time zone. The same time difference will be true when we are marking swaps as sent. The time difference is not ideal, but using the international mean time is more equitable for everyone on Swap-bot until we can come up with a more sophisticated solution.

Second, we temporarily removed Chat. It was not heavily used or very useful. We have plans to bring it back better and more engaging than ever in the coming months.

We are going to continue to make small tweaks to the site (and have some big ones planned), so if you see anything not working like you would expect, either leave a comment in the Help Discussion Forums or contact us through the admin contact form.

Thank you for you help and patience as we work to improve Swap-bot!