What's funny about this is that it's actually harder to write a program that only works between certain hours than it is to write one that works whenever it's available. As I posted in another thread: maybe there wouldn't be a programmer shortage if programmers actually worked on things that were valuable. A program to prevent someone from pasting in their password and a program to take a web service offline at a certain time involves a fair amount of engineering effort, but makes the world a worse, more disorganized place.<p>I always thought the role of humans was to try to stave off the effects of entropy. Work like this makes entropy do its business even faster. Think about that when you're sitting in your chair 10^100 years from now and the Universe's protons start decaying all around you: this is <i>your fault</i> for implementing a website that only works from nine to five.
Some guesses:<p>1) Their backend crashes constantly during normal use, so they have to shut it down when nobody is around to babysit.<p>2) The form submits directly to some poor soul's email, who then has to copy it onto a piece of paper and drop it in a folder. To manage the workload, the form is simply disabled when this person is not around.<p>3) The job of "web server" has not been mechanized in this particular office, in order to preserve the charm that only comes from a web site lovingly typed in real-time by a hard-working civil servant.
I've seen this a few times. It's usually not <i>quite</i> as insane as it looks. The underlying reasons that I've seen are:<p>* The web site is tied to an old fashioned batch system/mainframe that doesn't run in the same mode 24/7. Yes, the implementors could write a separate queue that managed this - but that would be often be a non-trivial amount of work.<p>* It's for a system that provides the online equivalent of an offline process, which has escapes that occasionally push the user out to talk to a human being. The human's aren't available 24/7.<p>* It's for a system that provides the online equivalent of an offline process, and there are legal or social requirements that the applications be "fair" - i.e. that the people going through the online and offline process should have the same opportunities. Having the online system run 24/7 puts people with online access at a significant advantage.
This is actually probably for legal reasons -- there is probably some law on the books that the exact date and time of official company interactions with the Secretary of State must be recorded in case there are disputes, and that for some reason of arcane legal text this must be during the operating hours of the office.
<i>Have you?</i><p>Yes. The site for the UK's "Companies House", an agency that registers and tracks British corporations, only used to work during work hours. I seem to recall a public hack day helped resolve this somehow but can't find a story about it now..
URLs say it all, no need to click unless you are curious:<p><a href="http://my-site-keeps-shabbat.org.ua/" rel="nofollow">http://my-site-keeps-shabbat.org.ua/</a> - SaaS (Shabbat/Shutdown as a Service)<p><a href="http://kosherdev.com/2009/11/wordpress-plugin-to-lock-site-for-shabat/" rel="nofollow">http://kosherdev.com/2009/11/wordpress-plugin-to-lock-site-f...</a>
Well, in the Netherlands we used to have a bank whose internet banking site closed around 23:00 hours and re-opened somewhere in the morning. AFAIK it was because all actual processing was done in batch during the night. Somewhere around 2006 they implemented a new Internet banking infrastructure and now they're open 24/7.
My Canadian insurance provider, Manulife, has this same restriction as well as pretty much every financial institute in Japan. What's worse too is that many Japanese ATMs will charge extra fees when you use them outside business hours - even at your own bank.
The Swedish tax agency also has some arbitrary times to post forms through their web site. I've had it explained to me that this is done to prevent major backlogs with (most likely) erroneous data (as people who send in their tax declaration at 2 am might be more prone to errors than at other times).<p>This means that if they were to have 24/7 service the taxmen and women would start each day with a back log, and Mondays with a larger backlog and then probably get even more delayed than they already are.<p>Now, I don't know at all if this is true or not, but I find it a rather plausible explanation.
Funny thing:
German tax department designed an API around polling tax data primarily for companies. I have to find an english link to the full story, but basically:
- company develops api to pull data like a few hundret requests per hour initially, but API returns a 404 after an hour of testing
- later that evening API returns an error stirng saying "open from 9 to 12 and 13 to 14:30"
- next day tax department calls company saying that they cannot handle those requests as the API was designed to be used once a year and that they crashed the server on and on with the sheer amount of requests<p>:)
If there is a human element in the loop, and with a government process it is fairly likely, then shutting down the website after hours and on weekends makes sense from a workplace environment point of view.<p>Walking in each morning to a huge backlog of work generated overnight is bad for moral...generating a backlog over weekends and holidays is even worse - spending one's Veterans Day off from work knowing that the backlog is piling up sucks.
My University has a class booking system that only works during the hours of 9am - 5pm; outside that, and you're not allowed to put bookings in. When you put a booking in, it sits "loading" for a few minutes (spinner GIF in a modal dialog).<p>(I have visions of people sitting behind desks ticking off bookings in real-time as they come in, like telephone operators from the 40s.)
This is done to save money. There's probably a rack of boxes handling the dirty work. 99% of users of the system are local, as in the same time zone. So if you kill the boxes at night, you save half of your electricity bill with minimal inconvenience.<p>Obviously you can solve your little dilemma in the cloud by scaling based on demand, but not everything can be put into EC2 or similar. Government sites that handle sensitive data certainly can't.
The Dutch Chamber of Commerce closes down its trade register between midnight and 9am or so. Because, of course, you should be sleeping then instead of doing business!
We have a customer only allowing registration for a webshop during working hours(!). In that case, it wasn't about marginal power bills, legislation or anything of the sort. It is just because their system is not fully automated, so whenever a new user registers, a person in the other end gets an email end manually has to enter the data in another system (SAP), before the user gets activated.
Interestingly enough, the University of Waterloo runs its co-op program through a website called Jobmine which allows students to search through job postings which they might be eligible for. Coincidently, it is also only available until midnight on weekdays and just recently started being available 24 hours on weekends.