BuddyPress.org

After getting support from the wpmu team the issue might in fact be with buddy press.

Please see the thread at wpmu, https://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/16374?replies=20

Final answer so far,

Brian, you’re facing a code issue it seems. Looking at the current trunk of BP anyway.

When BP generates the text for the “[time] ago” stuff, it passes a time string into a function in bp-core.php called bp_core_time_since.

In this function the date passed in is compared against a possible second value passed to the function. By default, that value is false.

When the value is false, it gets the current time as a numerical value (like using the time() function) for the current time as GMT using gmdate to create a date string, which is then converted to a numerical time value.

Here’s the problem. The time being passed into the function as the first parameter is the current server time, and not the GMT time. The second parameter to the function is not passed, thus defaulting to a false condition which then generates the value based on GMT.

The two times (older and newer as the vars are labeled) are then compared.

See the problem yet?

Yes, that’s right. It’s comparing one time to another, but they aren’t in the same timezone.

If is set as say, 7 hours behind GMT, the initial time passed into the function will be GMT -7. It then creates the current time as GMT without any offset to check against the time passed into the function.

So, no matter what you do, you’re already at a 7 hour difference within this function, and it will show something currently added to the activity as being 7 hours ago even though it just happened right now.

The times coming into this function either need to be in GMT, or when the time to compare against is created, it needs to be the server time.

Whichever happens, they need to both be in the same timezone so that 5 seconds ago is 5 seconds ago.

In summary, you don’t have a server problem, or an install problem. It’s a BP problem somewhere.