Andrew R. Jones

This weekend saw the end of British Summer Time, where the clocks in the UK go back an hour. In the old days, you needed to remember to change your clocks or risk making some embarrassing mistakes. But in today’s digital age, your PC, phones and other devices are smart enough to compensate for the change.

So you would think that any well designed website would also be smart enough to respond to the change in time. Especially if the main purpose of that site is to display the start and end times of TV programs. Well in the case of OntheBox.com, you would be wrong.

Compare the times in this screenshot from OntheBox, and a screenshot from Yahoo TV. Notice how at OntheBox, all the listings are an hour later than they are at Yahoo. Thats because it has been unable to correctly account for the change in times.

Unfortunately for me, this meant I after staying up to watch a program at 11pm, I tuned in just in time to see in the end credits. In my anger, I wrote this post to spread some bad publicity on their behalf, and also sent them the following message:

I thought you would like to know that the times on your website have been an hour out since the end of BST on Sunday morning.

Unfortunately for me I relied on your site and waited up till 11pm to watch Match of the Day 2, only to find it was in fact on at 10pm.

I find it astonishing that your website was not prepared for the change in time. Its not as if it was unexpected, the date when BST ends is set many years in advance. It is also not difficult to write software that can work out the time without human intervention.

On a website listing the TV schedule, displaying incorrect times is unforgivable, and with so many competing websites I expect you would have lost a number of regular visitors after today, including myself.

Regards,
Andrew Jones

Regardless of any response I get, I will be getting my future TV listings from one of the many other similar websites.

</rant>

Update

I should mention that I received a response from OntheBox, apologising whole-heartedly for their mistake. Its good that they responded in such a polite way .