Never mind.... like most other forums (I think) I assumed we were to make the adjustment based on GMT. But the server appears to be in the Eastern US time zone.
Yeah, I just decided to update (i.e. correct) my time settings and noticed the same thing. It's a pretty dumb way to do things. Like you say, almost every other implementation of forum software uses GMT internally, and lets users configure offsets from GMT. (I am assuming here it's a bug in the forum software, and not the way it was set up. because I'm sure our forum admins are aware of international users.)