Yeah I have thought about websites having "business hours" also. So support staff don't have to worry about getting a call or text message at 0200 that something isn't working... just fix it in the morning.
I recall this occurring with college registration websites ~25 years ago. In retrospect, I suspect it was so students registering online didn't have an advantage over those registering in person (at the time, home internet access was common but nowhere near 100%).
I had this happen at a local community College but it also was where you would access your grades. Shut down over winter break, was awkward to tell my internship coordinator that I couldn't access the website for 2 weeks to get my grades because the website was closed over break... Fricken crazy (and they where using a pretty popular platform, this was not some home spun system)
One of the largest camera stores in the US is https://www.bhphotovideo.com/. Since B&H was founded in NYC by Orthodox Jews, you can’t event place an order on their website on Saturdays.
Some Swedish government agency websites and services do this, for the reason already mentioned, to avoid having to monitor the service or maintain it during out of business hours.
But this social media actually reminded me of old phone line BBS. I believe life was better when we had to wait for our enjoyment, and even stand in line for it.
I literally can’t place Costco Mexico orders and perform other tasks on Sundays because payment gateways are down (?). It’s quite frustrating. If it fails every weekend, they should in fact just shut down.
I don’t share this thread’s ideas about making it accessible for everyone. I think people are too fixated on scale and inclusion.
It’s absolutely fine to work for three evening hours in a fixed timezone. Every timezone has enough people to not meet every one of them in a lifetime.
If someone wants this in their timezone, they can just llm-php it into existence. Or ask OP about sharing source codes.
Local communities all operate in the same time zone. No reason small online communities couldn’t operate in the same time zone, allowing each time zone to have their own separate communities.
It's one of the main things I miss about BBSs. I've thought about trying to start a BBS that requires a low ping, using the speed of light to encourage locality.
Expensive long-distance phone calls sucked, but the side-effect was that nearly everybody on a given board was in the same or one-adjacent local calling area. They were strangers behind a screen only to a degree; they were also your neighbors, schoolmates, and coworkers. If someone needed something, someone else could bike or drive over and help. We had parties, we had picnics, we organized camping weekends. They didn't stay strangers for long.
Yes the global internet was big and shiny and it let you talk to anyone anywhere. So far away that they might in fact be a dog, and you'd never know. But for all we gained, we lost that sense of local connection, and I didn't appreciate that aspect until it was gone.
All of the (continental) US is in similar enough timezones, that whatever 3 hour window is convenient for one part is still easily accessible for the others.
Those are all states that have multiple timezones for the same longitude. Travel North or South and you change time zones.
You can also add Arizona to the list, but for only part of the year, as Arizona and the Hopi nation do not follow daylight savings time, but the Navajo nation, which fully surrounds the Hopi, does
This was in response to a comment up thread about making it limited to people in the same time zone, an imposed limitation rather than a self arising onr
If you are traveling and need to deal with something that happens at home, too bad. There are plenty of timezones that make it quite difficult to manage, especially if they have phone wait times that exceed 30min.
Depends entirely upon the issue and the urgency. Hell, I'd wager we could all use a bit more patience and a bit less of everything being so instantaneous.
IIRC it's because the owners are Jewish and observing the Sabbath. I grew up in an area with a lot of observant christians who refused to work on Sunday but forced employees to (unless you belonged to their church of course). So making a rule in contrast that what's good enough for me is good enough for my employees is preferable if you ask me!
