I have a need to be able to set times I wish to record alarms from 8pm until 6am daily. during the other times, I do not want ZM you save any events even if motion is detected.

You can add to the table, two hour comuns, the start and the end hour, and then you can add in the query in line 878 in the src/zm_zone.cpp the filter to enable only between the start and end event hours. I haven't tested it yet but I think it'll work, the only problem is that you need to modify the query and the interface.
Knolidge needed:
SQL->MySQL
Table to modify -> Zones
in database zm
You can find the database configuration in the zm.conf file in /etc/zm/ folder.
Good Luck.