Scheduled plugins: “Start immediately” behaves differently in QA and PROD, and PROD auto-fills the publisher’s timezone

Hi all,

I’ve hit a few issues with scheduled plugins that make schedules hard to verify and debug.

“Start immediately after publishing” behaves differently between my QA and PROD environments, and neither matches the docs. The Scheduled Triggers docs say cron schedules use the Start at time zone first, then the End at time zone, and fall back to UTC if neither is set. They also say that after publishing, “Start immediately” becomes “Start at” with the publish time saved.

• In QA, the setting stays on “Start immediately after publishing” and never flips to “Start at.” The plugin ran at the expected time last Friday.
• In PROD, it flips to “Start at” with the publish time, but my time zone is also pre-filled behind the time zone selector. I never chose one, and nothing in the UI said it was set.

The flip in PROD matches the docs, but the time zone isn’t mentioned there. Given the documented priority order, a pre-filled time zone would take the place of the UTC default. The time zone picker also has no UTC option, only Greenwich Mean Time, which isn’t equivalent. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to set a true UTC schedule in PROD. Both of the schedules are shown below, after publishing their respective plugins and waiting for the schedules to populate. We had to manually set the time zone in PROD to be GMT, which is technically not the same as what QA would be in UTC, it originally had set it’s time zone to the publisher’s time zone (EST)

QA Schedule:

PROD Schedule:

Run times don’t show a time zone. I work in a different time zone than most of my coworkers, so I can’t tell whether a listed run time is my local time, the publisher’s, the schedule’s, or UTC. A time zone label or UTC offset next to each time would help a lot in debugging.

The run preview only shows 3 recent and 3 upcoming runs. The schedule shown runs on Fridays, 7 times, starting at a set hour and repeating hourly. With only 3 upcoming runs visible, I can’t confirm runs 4 through 7 are scheduled correctly or that the series ends where it should. A full list for bounded schedules, or an expandable view, would help a lot.

Is any of this on the roadmap, or has anyone found a workaround?