The time is Eastern Time of North America, used by Ontario, Quebec, etc.
For those dates in this forum:
Red: the same day of your reading;
Purple-red: Yesterday's post;
Dark-purple: The day before yesterday's post;
Black: posts of three days ago.
For the Category words:
There's category word at the head of each topic, in general all these words are in green color. If the topic is a "Reserved" topic, the color changes to purple-red.
Seems this forum is quite fancy. :-)