Setting the Locale and Time Zone

You can set the default locale, time zone, and character set for your community. The correct locale helps to make people's experience in the community feel more familiar and comfortable.

Locale represents a set of user interface properties -- including language and time zone, for example -- that are often related to the user's geographic region. The locale setting determines what language UI default text is displayed in. It also determines how dates are formatted, what the character encoding is, and so on. For communities that want to support a broad variety of languages, Jive requires using "UTF-8" (Unicode) as your character encoding.

You can use the Locale settings to determine the time zone Jive uses for the midnight start time and 11:59 end time for announcements, polls, projects, tasks, and checkpoints. Blog posts obtain their settings from the user's time zone.

Fastpath: Admin Console > System > Settings > Locale
Note: Only a subset of the languages listed are actually available in the application by default. For a list of languages in the subset, visit your user preferences page and view the Languages list on the Preferences page.

Locale Inheritance Rules

As a community administrator, be aware that when you modify locale settings for the application (global) or a space, the user may have also set their own locale preferences, which will take precedence. Here is the locale precedence hierarchy, with the first given the highest precedence:
  1. Locale set by the user in their Preferences.
  2. Locale set in the user's Web browser. (For example, a browser set to English will override global settings you make for another locale).
  3. Locale set at the space level (in Admin Console > Spaces > Settings > Space Settings). See Setting Space Name, Locale, and Allowed Content Types.
  4. Locale set at the root space (global) level (Admin Console > System > Settings > Locale).
Note: The server time zone set on the operating system can occasionally override some of the other Locale settings. If you encounter unexpected mixed-language results on your site, try checking the OS language set on the machines where you installed Jive.