As some of you may know, the rules for daylight saving time in the United States change starting this year, and in fact they go on DST at 2:00 a.m. tomorrow -- three weeks or so earlier than they used to.
The Really, Really Short Version
The abbrevation of the timezone on your profile may have changed just now, but don't worry about it, we've just changed it because the underlying software we use changed. The rules being applied will still be correct. If you live in Canada or certain Central and South American countries and you had previously listed your timezone using a U.S. abbreviation like EST, you might want to update your profile to use the time zone you actually live in (e.g., "Canada/Eastern") because the rules in your country may not be the same as the updated rules in the U.S.
The Slightly Longer Version
The U.S. changes required an update to some software Pocket-Monkey uses, since of course Pocket-Monkey does time zone calculations so we can show you dates and times in your timezone. When the suppliers of that software made those changes, they also made some of the time zone definitions more strict, so to avoid confusion (and a couple of bugs they introduced when doing that), we're not using the really short abbreviations anymore as they were a bit ambiguous anyway.
Specifically, if your profile used to have EST, CST, MST, PST, AST, HST, or NST listed as its time zone, we've changed them for you:
This means that you'll continue to see times in "daylight saving time" when appropriate. The old abbreviations no longer appear on our list.
Again, if you live in Canada or certain Central and South American countries and you had used a U.S. abbreviation, you might want to change your time zone to the appropriate one for where you actually live.
More Boring Detail for Nerdy Types Like Me
I'll use the eastern U.S. as an example: People living in the eastern U.S. live (unsurprisingly) in the "Eastern" U.S. time zone. Many people will abbreviate this as "EST", which stands for Eastern Standard Time, but of course several months out of the year this is not accurate -- because when DST is in effect, they're living in Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), not EST.
Until recently, some software used by Pocket-Monkey had a fairly loose definition of "EST" -- it treated it as meaning the U.S. Eastern time zone, and applied daylight saving time adjustments to it when appropriate in the year. They've changed that now, though, "EST" is no longer synonymous with "U.S. Eastern". (In the process, they've introduced at least two bugs, but we're avoiding those by making the change listed above.)
So instead of using the old, somewhat-ambiguous abbreviations, we're using the newer ones so they keep working as you expect.
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