Perhaps it should? Users won't think about this sort of thing and could be sad later. Even then, offering them a timezone isn't enough because some of them won't think to change it. Or won't know what 'UTC' means anyway. "local" is a vague term... User's browser? server? database? If the browser doesn't send a Z(something) at the end of the date string and the server doesn't convert using the browser's locale, the server and database are going to store the given date in whatever their local (usually the OS but can be overridden) time is. Assuming the server and db are both fixed at UTC it'll publishing at that time UTC. Something must be handling TZ otherwise using a BST browser now to schedule for 9am tomorrow would store a date of 9am server local time and so actually publish at 10am BST.