[SOLVED] Very strange date comparison in Auto Action

I have a simple auto-action that checks todays date against the birthday for the user, and if it matches, it creates a salute that is shown in the activity stream.
I found a small error in the setup yesterday, and got it fixed, today there is a birthday, but for some reason it misses the date comparison.
It's an activity that has the Users trigger.

In Debug it reads:
Action 164 :: Conditional 2 failed for 407: 09-11 Equal To 09-12

The Conditional 2 reads:
[cb:parse function="date" date-format="m-d" time="false"][cb_birthday][/cb:parse] Equal To [cb:date format="m-d" /]
So the latter value is todays date, and the first is from the profile.

User 407's birthday is set to
12 - 09 - 1970

Looking in the databaase user 407 reads
cb_birthday 1970-09-12

Looks like it's being offset. Try adding offset="UTC" to your date format function usage.

Ok, I updated to v7 of AA, just to be sure that it wasn't that.
Then I changed the comparison to
[cb:parse function="date" date-format="m-d" time="false"][cb_birthday][/cb:parse]
Equal To
[cb:date format="m-d" offset="UTC"/]
But I don't get why that should be necessary, I was testing it 7 am, that is a HUGE offset if that was the case???
I've rerun it with debug activate for that action, but with v7, debug doesn't show anything in the output.

If the date comparison suddenly starts failing, it's going to be catascrophic for my site, I have a lot of date automations for the members.
Again, I can just reiterate, this has worked previously...

The cb:date substitution has always worked that way and passes the current datetime through server offset unless you tell it not to. The cb:parse usage should already be in UTC as by default it doesn't server offset. Basically what your cb:date usage is doing is taking the current datetime and formatting it to month and day after being server offset. By setting offset to UTC it won't offset.

Yes, and it still behaves differently than when it was last used a year ago, this is not new auto-actions I've built, they were built last year, and tested extensively.

Now what about the issue that makes it impossible to debug it now? I've activated debug, but no debug is shown when testing it?

This behavior has never changed. The CB date substitution has always offset. My guess is you've never noticed it.

Now what about the issue that makes it impossible to debug it now? I've activated debug, but no debug is shown when testing it?

Debugging outputs to the Joomla message queue. Should output the error on the next page load as a error message wherever your Joomla template displays its message queue. Ensure debugging is enabled in the Auto Action then ensure within Joomla global configuration you've debug mode and maximum error reporting configured. Previously it'd just randomly var dump the error message when it happened which was unreliable.