@4oureyes: The timestamps have had their current form for quite some time now, at least a year.
@shadowcat: My time zone should be used for me, and Londonguy's for him. However, it can be a pain in the ass to localize time display. It's eminently doable, but there's a number of prerequisites to make it simpler, one of which is storing full time zone information in the fields in the DB. Again, not difficult in and of itself, but a pain to go back and change existing data.
There are tools to make it all but automatic, but again, it's retrofitting existing code to make it happen. And from what I've heard, despite our fascination and participation, the discussion board takes a distant second place to the club listings. The club listings are the sites revenue generator.