Calender invitations in Zulu time, instead of local time ?

[DocMike65]

I have a few clients who complained that my invitations are always the wrong time in their calendars. Currently the meetings start 2 hours later in their calender.

I dug into this, studied various ICS files and I think I found the reason:
They seem to have a broken iCal implementation.

Vivaldi uses TZID, VTIMEZONE and DAYLIGHT features and then sends the invitation times in local time. Not all systems seem to support that. They seem to ignore those features and assume the invitation times are Zulu times. So they add the current offset of +2 hours to our local time.

I checked a couple of ICS files from other systems and many of them (including google) do not seem to use these features. They do not provide time zone info in the ICS, simply send the invitation times in Zulu and leave it up to the receiving calendar to do the time adjustment. This seems to cause less compatibility issues and the files are smaller too.

Is there any way how I can switch vivaldi to sending Zulu times?

Regards, Mike

+++++

Extract from a vivaldi generated ICS:
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:Europe/Berlin
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
DTSTART:20220327T030000
TZOFFSETFROM:+0100
TZOFFSETTO:+0200
TZNAME:CEST
END:DAYLIGHT
END:VTIMEZONE

BEGIN:VEVENT
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20220414T110000
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20220414T100000

+++++

Extract from a corresponding google calendar genrated ICS:
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20220414T080000Z
DTEND:20220414T09000Z

[JMRobinson]

I have noticed the same issue. The only work around I have is to add a comment that the time is my time zone and also add Zulu. {ie meeting time is 0900h EST | 1400h UTC} I've been communicating with people around the world for years and whenever we setup a virtual meeting, we all publish our local time AND UTC.

Also, the issue is not really with your calendar but theirs. Only they can make their calendars work the way they should.

[Hadden89]

@docmike65 I'm not sure if should be considered a feature request or a bug (as other cals handle the matter in a different way) but would be useful a bug report to ensure dev check for this soon or later: https://vivaldi.com/bugreport/
But what you are asking for seems to be a workaround for a bad implementation, so probably a feature request would be better.

[eggert]

@hadden89 As I understand this problem then the issue is with the calendar receiving the events not properly handling correct time information. That being said the approach that Vivaldi Calendar takes with timezones, even though it is fully valid AFAICT, might be unnecessarily literal. For example for one off events that do not repeat we could fall back to sending events in UTC which seems to be the way that google calendar does it in the snippets you sent.

Unfortunately we don't have a way for you to do that automatically at the moment but a workaround might be for you to manually set the timezone of events that you send to clients to UTC. It will make editing of time inconvenient requiring you to input time values in UTC, but the event should still show on correct time in your views. This way the event ics should be exported in similar format to the google one you posted.

We still have some work to do to improve and simplify our handling of timezones.

Thanks for using Vivaldi Calendar and taking the time to report issues, greatly appreciated.

Kv. Eggert

[ooocp]

I am seeing issues with this also.
The solution imho is not far. It is to always send invitations with the time zone I am in and receive invitations THEY are in. That is - if I see it right - the case with version 7 of Vivaldi calendar. So far so good for Vivaldi.
The issue for me is, that an event I receive from Kenya (EAT) will be shown in my calendar in EAT time allthough my time zone is CET. That means confusion.
When I click on the event, I can see that vivaldi recognizes the time zone EAT but does not automatically convert it to my calendar view, which is in CET.
Am I missing a configuration setting?