Some customers have reported that the live drawing and start and end times are not behaving as they expected.

We pull from the wordpress timezone 'gmt_offset'.  So it should be fine with UTC+xx or UTC-yy

In 95% of the time it is correct.

BUT  - In some cases, wordpress timezones are not correct.  So the times will be UTC.  We have not figured out what causes it.  We have tested the calls outside of our plugin and find the same issue so it is not related to our plugin, but something that wordpress is doing that ends up ignoring the timezone.  We have seen this in dozens of plugins that use timezones we have tested not just ours in the past several months in trying to see what is happening.

If you are unsure if your server is behaving properly - Post the raffle with the proper time, if it shows incorrect, then it is getting the UTC timezone from wordpress and not the gmt_offset, so move the time backwards or forward xx hours to get the time you want.

We have one site where the raffle start and stop feature of our new upcoming  beta version are getting the incorrect value from wordpress and the live drawing is getting the correct value for the timezone with the same exact time call.   In this instance it was page dependent.  So a certain a plugin was overwriting the wordpress time on certain pages where that page was loaded.

When you google wordpress utc and local time not correct in google - there are a ton of issues. Some plugins overwrite the wordpress settings but it also seems it could be php settings, or server settings.  There also seems to be challenges in the wordpress time if you set from a city vs the utc +-.

In short - we simply do not have enough info at this time to be sure as to what can cause the discrepancy.  We have 2 cpanel configs on the same server, with the same php.ini and same wordpress setting and we get different results on the same php call to get the wordpress gmt_offset.