At the bottom of each page on the forum, I find text like

This page was generated in about 0.013s by Fossil 2.25 [9866c97b35] 2024-06-14 00:06:10

That date is a couple days ago, and moreover, it does not change. It is the same for all pages.

I had thought the timestamp might be useful to let me see how long ago I refreshed the page, as I have a couple tabs always open on the Fossil and SQLite forum home pages. In fact, I would have liked to have the timestamp more prominently displayed at the top of the page for that reason.

So now I suspect that's the version of Fossil, rather than the page generation date time.

Correct - that's the timestamp for that specific version of fossil.

@hanche: my recommendation is to subscribe to the forums in question so that you'll get the posts, in proper sorted order, directly in your mail app. You presumably have your mail open 24/7, so getting the posts by mail would keep you from having to keep two extra browser tabs open for those forums.

PS: it's my personal opinion that having the page-generation timestamp on the forums would not be generally useful, in that (A) it would provide no actionable information and (B) it would necessarily be rendered in either UTC or the hosting server's local time, which would likely cause confusion.

Well, that explains the mystery.

I really prefer the web version of the forum over email, since only a small minority of the threads interest me anyhow.

Having a timestamp to look at is not that important to me, I just thought it might be convenient and was puzzled by the apparent timestamp that wasn't. If present, it should be UTC (with a trailing Z), definitely not the server's local time. (Best would be my local time, but that would require javascript. Overkill for sure.)