Well, it's like this. Once upon a time, there were between 7 and 10 servers, named Bob, Larry, Moe, Curley, Bob II, Bob III, Bob IV, Cluster7, Lucy, The server which shall NOT be named, etc. They were happy servers who lived in a commune with much glee. In the beginning, each server had a time, and that time was THE time, and all shared THE time, and it was good and there was much rejoiceing
Then, one day the hoards of FFXI people came unto the site en-masse, and bogged down the servers in various amounts being adequatly described as bunches of peoples, and the servers were tired and weary. they slowly lost time sync, so that a BobII and Bob III had THE time, but THE time was no longer the same THE time.
now when the users came and posted with much gnashing of teath, they would recieve the timestamp of doom from bobII, let's say 2:07pm. The user then thinks of another really spiffy idea and goes to post again. in between posting and viewing, BobII got loaded up, so the server collective mind thingy (they are the bork. Resistance is feudal) decides to shunt our hapless poster to BobIII.
BobIII is 30 seconds ahead of BobII. so BobIII sees the timestamp of doom, and goes hmmm, wait a minute, this is actually 30 seconds, plus however many seconds under the filter the time was and goes "Thou art postething too fast darn it, 30+whatever seconds remaining"
Seeing as there are multiples of servers, on a bad day you can get quite a few of them out of sync, so depending on what server you hit you can get upwards of 50 seconds of seperation or more. there is a piece of code in place to prevent that, but it doesn't always seem to work. I personally think we need to build $3.7 cesium atomic clocks into each one, but for some reason that idea didn't fly well when i brought it up...