Where can I set the user timezone?

[christianlupus]

Nextcloud version (eg, 20.0.5): 28.0.3
Operating system and version (eg, Ubuntu 20.04): Archlinux running community docker container
Apache or nginx version (eg, Apache 2.4.25): Reverse proxy in Arch 2.4.58 plus Apache in container
PHP version (eg, 7.4): 8.2.16

The issue you are facing:

Sorry, this question might be dump but where can a user set his/her time zone?

I found the setting in the oc_preferences table with appid='core', configkey='timezone and the appropriate userid. But this involved access to the DB by the admin and cannot be the way to go to change the personal time zone.

I stumbled over this as a user was not receiving any emails but instead, the activity app spammed the logs about the inability to get a valid time zone for said user. It was set to Etc/Unknown which is obviously no valid time zone.

I saw that other users as well do have a wrong time zone setting but at least a valid time zone. So here it is merely a question of usability.

I skipped over all logs as this is a pure UI/UX issue.

[tflidd]

Normally I think it is done from the browser, you can disable the detection from the browser (in case of FF):

Time of Nextcloud instance not correct

I figured out what was wrong. It was not the timezone of the host system being off, but it was my browser reporting the wrong time. When I opened the console in the browser, and ran Date() the timezone and time I got back was wrong. Turns out Nextcloud relies on the timezone reported by the browser, which makes sense thinking about it. If anyone else has this problem, a possible cause for your timezone in Firefox being wrong is if you have privacy.resistFingerprinting enabled in about:config.

You can set a default time zone if most of your users are in the same one:

nextcloud/server/blob/master/config/config.sample.php#L240-L247

Then in theory, I’d expect that it should fall back to this one…