The thing is that it's not easy to fix. The forum loads all of its pages dynamically based on a ton of variables. One of those variables is the time zone setting that you have set in your profile. You see everything in Eastern Time because that's what you have your preferences set to.

The front page doesn't work that way. It's built every 3 minutes by the server and cached. It knows nothing about your time zone when it does it, or even if you're a logged in user or not-- it displays the page that it put together on it's last build.

We could change it to print times relative to the current time, like "posted 2 mins ago", but that really kills part of the point in caching it. It's just more processing that has to be done to figure out what needs to be displayed on the page.

I'm open to suggestions.