Imagine for instance if Hackernews was only open from 12pm to 11pm on weekdays and until 1 AM on weeekends.
Also, you cannot make people feel a sense of community with you by annoying them. Annoying someone will make them dislike you.
Similarly, they may not want to have you in their community. So, the community they form might be smaller, but more aligned with what they want.
They are definitely reducing their pool of customers, but maybe they are still attracting the customers they want. Why not let the market decide if they can find enough customers with this approach.
Honestly, the banks I use in the US often do something similar. It’s not as bad as this, and only on their online banking site, not their marketing site. They have maintenance windows late at night (in their time zone), and don’t allow logins during that time. It’s not always every night, but it’s often enough that I’ve noticed (at 3-4am).
Even if the OP thinks everyone is on US time, there are like 3 different time zones even over there...
Even for Black Friday, which could potentially result in them losing business. I can respect it though.
I ended up deciding it would be too much trouble to keep it secure and prevent spam for what amounted to a small idea, but I've been secretly hoping someone else comes up with it someday.
In which timezone?
Fun fact, there exists a bug with EQ Bank where a deleted savings account still counts towards the maximum of 5 savings accounts. The customer service agent indicated this was a known bug and had been for some time! I'm planning to leave within the next year.
what a great problem to have
Some websites are subject to legislation* that requires real people to be available to assist. So if they use local employees to provide assistance, the website ends up being shut down outside of business hours.
This isn't a US bank, but if you see a US government site do this for example, that's usually why.
(* an incidental "benefit" of legislation like this is regulatory capture. It doesn't matter if some code mill like Accenture is the worst technical choice, they already have experience providing warm bodies for the phone line. It raises the bar for getting contracts incredibly high since they're treated as a package deal)
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Edit response because I'm being rate limited...
It's all rooted in Section 508: https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/
> Under Section 508, agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information comparable to the access available to others.
Each state has their own extensions and guidance too: https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/state/
And in combination with those state amendments sometimes "access to information comparable to the access available to others" ends up being translated into needing someone to be accessible at all hours that the site is operated.
One thing to remember is that behemoths like Accenture and co also get to tip the scale. The law is vague enough that maybe in theory you could argue that you don't need a live human to meet the requirement... that won't stop incumbents for putting proposals that make it the defacto approach.
Do you have any examples that of US legislation that requires being able to reach a local employee? I can barely get state government departments to respond to me, and there are multiple states I have called during normal business hours that flat out say “we are too busy today, call tomorrow”.
The idea of a government in the US legislating access to a government employee is laughable, based on my experiences.
https://www.fcc.gov/media/customer-service-standards
And these banking regulations are too long for me to skim in too much detail, but they mention "telephone" 138 times in the context of various requirements of availability for certain functions and during certain times. One such example:
> 7. Telephone line availability. To satisfy the readily-available standard, the financial institution must provide enough telephone lines so that consumers get a reasonably prompt response. The institution need only provide telephone service during normal business hours. Within its primary service area, an institution must provide a local or toll-free telephone number. It need not provide a toll-free number or accept collect long-distance calls from outside the area where it normally conducts business.
https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-580.html
But more specifically about government requirements, there's stuff like the ADA which requires specific means of access, and there's other things like the USPS USO which, for instance, requires 6 day per week postal service. I'm sure there are others.
Everybody seemed to know this, everybody seemed to think it's normal, but as a foreigner i thought the site had crashed.
for those interested: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation...
* My perception of time is notoriously bad, but I know for sure it was later than 2005
