I'm now using the notification feature in phprunner. I am adding notifications two different ways and the date/time is not matching.
If I use an external file to add a notification to the database table the date/time is correct for my timezone.
If I use the event code inside phprunner to add a notification to the database table the date/time is 4 hours ahead of my actual date/time. The notification dropdown will say that the notification came in "5 minutes ago" but if you check the actual created date/time in the table it is 4 hours in the future.
Because of this time difference it makes it look like messages I insert with external code are actually much older than they really are. While I could change my external code to be 4 hours later this seems like a bad idea because the created date/time in the database would still be 4 hours ahead of what the real time is.