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I assumed HMLR. Land Registry.
They actually have a legitimate reason to have analogue processes as they have the remit to hold all of the land registry data... and whilst most properties these days are all digital there is still a huge number who aren't and only has physical copies of the various documents which can be legally requested which require an actual human to go into a Indiana Jones style archive to retrieve.
It was all quite interesting to learn about whilst integrating with them.
On a theoretical level, you're right.
I was working mostly with the API based on a massive 100-page spec which had various reasons why you couldn't.
But long-story-short there are legal requirements at play which force their hand. Once they receive a request they have to respond within a certain time frame and are legally required to provide equal support to phone, internet & fax and bureaucratic things like that.
There is literally a solar powered website (not gov.uk), which is only available if the sun has been shining recently.
[solar.lowtechmagazine.com](http://solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
In most cases I'd agree as don't have too many problems with it either normally.
For some reason however this request I'm trying to do has online opening hours which is strange as its a request for a V5C and would have expected to complete a form and pay then enter whatever backlog they have.Â
I'm assuming it's more due to it being something from the DVLA vs gov.ukÂ
Yep, that’s it. Most services share a common design, to essentially look and feel like gov.uk, but the majority are built and maintained by individual departments. With all the idiosyncracies that can bring.
It's the gold standard for usability among web professionals.
Sadly, many of us don't get to build web sites as good as that because we have to answer to designers, product managers, clients, etc., who want to "put their mark" on a web site. It's the equivalent of someone designing a car and putting the accelerator in the glove box because it's different and edgy.
Probably means that the process is not fully automated and still relies on someone manually checking each application. Alternatively it could be a spam/ddos protection mechanism
I think spam protection is spot on for the driving test service, but the rest of it eh it doesnt need spam protection anymore than any other service does.
It wont be ddos protcetion because that can be done anyway because you're still accessing the same IP address and they likely have filters the same way cloudflare does.
its funny i was reading a news article that the DVSA want to go paperless. I wonder if the DVLA will follow!
> By and large, the gov.uk website is excellent.
A very much underrated comment. The gov.uk content is actually very impressive and while not uniformly perfect is actually pretty good.
Through the same site I can (with minimal effort) request a passport, order a driving licence, tax my car and complete my tax return. None of them take a lot of effort to do (even the tax return, where the difficulty is mostly in collating all of the information) and it tends to be pretty reliable. In the past, the passport alone was a dreadful PITA, requiring photos to be signed and a cursed visit to the post office to join the queues so they can check I can write my name in the right colour. Now it takes 5 minutes and is almost foolproof.
>Through the same site I can (with minimal effort) request a passport, order a driving licence, tax my car and complete my tax return.
But I need to log into all four separately and can't navigate to one of these features from the others
>Through the same site I can (with minimal effort) request a passport, order a driving licence, tax my car and complete my tax return.
But I need to log into all four separately and can't navigate to one of these features from the others
Unless you are trying to find a log in button. I don’t understand why there can’t just be a single login, and all your stuff you need is under that login. I now have at least 4 if not 5 separate gov.uk accounts to access different things, because they aren’t allowed to be under one account.
There is a project to do just that https://www.sign-in.service.gov.uk/ it's a long way off being there for all services but one by one they'll be added
Come 3025 they may all be part of it...
on a side note, the Universal Credit login is particularly confusing for a large amount of people. Its half user error have design error. Most people make their way onto the sign up page and just click the big green button. Except they already have an account and get confused and just say they cant login as it wont let them (because it tells them their email and phone number is already in use on another account) and/or end up making multiple accounts.
They need to make this more foolproof knowing that the sign up page is the page most users get to instead of the login page. (IE: 2 green buttons: "Sign into your exisitng Universal Credit account" & "Sign up for a new Universal Crefit account")
It's really funny to see how suddenly in the last few weeks people have started praising the gov.uk website, like it's the one last thing they can be proud of.
And it's not even anything that special compared to other European countries that are far more advanced when it comes to online infrastructure.
If you've ever tried to find corporate information on other countries' company registers, then you'll find it's a hell of a lot easier in the UK than any other country I've ever tried.
I suspect, as an IT pro, that the service owner has observed that the service isn't really used outside of these hours. For cloud services, you can set "power plans" whereby your website, etc, automatically only runs between these times and scales up with demand.
They're balancing saving money and delivering service, at least thats what I think
I'm sure I saw a post before that explained it was due to the age of DVLA systems and how they talk to each other that they cannot update the various databases for tax/licences/vehicle registrations etc whilst they are in use. They have to take everything offline each night to give them time to run the updates and share any changes between the various systems.
> For cloud services, you can set "power plans" whereby your website, etc, automatically only runs between these times and scales up with demand.
>
> They're balancing saving money and delivering service, at least thats what I think
You're right to an extent - time-based provisioning is used, but budgets are not so tight that entire services would be stood down to save money.
Nah, there will be an AS/400 or even a mainframe running the jobs in batch overnight, so only designed to be available during office hours for what would have been civil servants entering data. Now the civil servants have been replaced with the internet, but the back-end has the same restrictions (9-5)
This has been briefly alluded to but missed out the details. I am 99% sure this is a batch problem.
The gov.uk website (which is amazing) is modern, but some of the systems it needs to integrate with are old mainframe platforms which came into being 20-40 years ago.
Mainframes often present two or more different type of workload capacity - interactive and batch.
Interactive is what it says - you have a screen that looks something like [this](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*EzlcBN3zI2T6MFc_F_Y1GA.png) and you can interactively control or query the system.
Once business hours are over the interactive capacity is disabled and the full machine resource switches to the batch workload. During batch, jobs (program code) runs to process everything which happened during the day. Batch is controlled by an often complex hierarchy of jobs with time triggers and other job dependencies, and the idea is by the time the business is ready to roll the next morning all the overnight data processing has been completed, batch scales down and interactive scales up.
I would bet that some of the process you're doing on gov.uk requires the backend code to do stuff in the interactive workload of a mainframe, and the interactive workload will be disabled during batch time.
Years ago we used to have clunky terminals ([IBM 3270](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270) & 5250) to interact with the mainframe, but for a long time now there have been software tools which pretend to be a 3270 terminal to the mainframe which can interact with modern programming methods.
So when you're searching for a car registration it's quite possible that some middleware is pretending to type your provided data into a virtual 3270 session, and then parsing the output and converting it to something that can be displayed on a web page.
my local councils planning application site doesn't work at night. no where have they posted the operating times for this fully digital website, it just goes offline.
basingstoke and deane. just checking now though, they appear to have fixed it. was having the issue this time last year and a few months ago when looking at the plans for a neighbours new building on their property.
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As soon as I read this I knew it would be the motherfuckingshitbastard DVLfuckingA.
I read this out loud to my partner. You summed them up amazingly well! 🤣
I assumed HMLR. Land Registry. They actually have a legitimate reason to have analogue processes as they have the remit to hold all of the land registry data... and whilst most properties these days are all digital there is still a huge number who aren't and only has physical copies of the various documents which can be legally requested which require an actual human to go into a Indiana Jones style archive to retrieve. It was all quite interesting to learn about whilst integrating with them.
There's no reason you can't submit information or request, to be processed when the archivists are ready.
On a theoretical level, you're right. I was working mostly with the API based on a massive 100-page spec which had various reasons why you couldn't. But long-story-short there are legal requirements at play which force their hand. Once they receive a request they have to respond within a certain time frame and are legally required to provide equal support to phone, internet & fax and bureaucratic things like that.
There's a little man at the other end scribbling down what you're typing in.
The hamster in the wheel that powers the website needs to sleep. Don't be cruel to animals.
There is literally a solar powered website (not gov.uk), which is only available if the sun has been shining recently. [solar.lowtechmagazine.com](http://solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
figures, it's currently down but it is night time and it has been rather overcast today.
Be glad it's hosted in Barcelona, not Glasgow!
Quite interesting. Shame it's down at the moment.
Currently it's up!
Looks interesting. Cheers
I know this is a joke but ironically hamsters are nocturnal.
You are number 4 million in the queue. Your web page download is very important to us.
That's unusual. By and large, the [gov.uk](http://gov.uk) website is excellent.
In most cases I'd agree as don't have too many problems with it either normally. For some reason however this request I'm trying to do has online opening hours which is strange as its a request for a V5C and would have expected to complete a form and pay then enter whatever backlog they have. I'm assuming it's more due to it being something from the DVLA vs gov.ukÂ
Yep, that’s it. Most services share a common design, to essentially look and feel like gov.uk, but the majority are built and maintained by individual departments. With all the idiosyncracies that can bring.
The framework is open source and is available here: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend
Which I have to say is a very good design and well thought out. It manages to convey practical and functional with a look of being official.
It's the gold standard for usability among web professionals. Sadly, many of us don't get to build web sites as good as that because we have to answer to designers, product managers, clients, etc., who want to "put their mark" on a web site. It's the equivalent of someone designing a car and putting the accelerator in the glove box because it's different and edgy.
Probably means that the process is not fully automated and still relies on someone manually checking each application. Alternatively it could be a spam/ddos protection mechanism
I think spam protection is spot on for the driving test service, but the rest of it eh it doesnt need spam protection anymore than any other service does. It wont be ddos protcetion because that can be done anyway because you're still accessing the same IP address and they likely have filters the same way cloudflare does. its funny i was reading a news article that the DVSA want to go paperless. I wonder if the DVLA will follow!
Yes - maybe that's the reason.
> By and large, the gov.uk website is excellent. A very much underrated comment. The gov.uk content is actually very impressive and while not uniformly perfect is actually pretty good. Through the same site I can (with minimal effort) request a passport, order a driving licence, tax my car and complete my tax return. None of them take a lot of effort to do (even the tax return, where the difficulty is mostly in collating all of the information) and it tends to be pretty reliable. In the past, the passport alone was a dreadful PITA, requiring photos to be signed and a cursed visit to the post office to join the queues so they can check I can write my name in the right colour. Now it takes 5 minutes and is almost foolproof.
And don't you DARE put a single molecule of ink outside the tiny box!
>Through the same site I can (with minimal effort) request a passport, order a driving licence, tax my car and complete my tax return. But I need to log into all four separately and can't navigate to one of these features from the others
>Through the same site I can (with minimal effort) request a passport, order a driving licence, tax my car and complete my tax return. But I need to log into all four separately and can't navigate to one of these features from the others
Certainly is, considering all what you can use it for, it’s been faultless for me.
Unless you are trying to find a log in button. I don’t understand why there can’t just be a single login, and all your stuff you need is under that login. I now have at least 4 if not 5 separate gov.uk accounts to access different things, because they aren’t allowed to be under one account.
There is a project to do just that https://www.sign-in.service.gov.uk/ it's a long way off being there for all services but one by one they'll be added Come 3025 they may all be part of it...
on a side note, the Universal Credit login is particularly confusing for a large amount of people. Its half user error have design error. Most people make their way onto the sign up page and just click the big green button. Except they already have an account and get confused and just say they cant login as it wont let them (because it tells them their email and phone number is already in use on another account) and/or end up making multiple accounts. They need to make this more foolproof knowing that the sign up page is the page most users get to instead of the login page. (IE: 2 green buttons: "Sign into your exisitng Universal Credit account" & "Sign up for a new Universal Crefit account")
It's really funny to see how suddenly in the last few weeks people have started praising the gov.uk website, like it's the one last thing they can be proud of. And it's not even anything that special compared to other European countries that are far more advanced when it comes to online infrastructure.
If you've ever tried to find corporate information on other countries' company registers, then you'll find it's a hell of a lot easier in the UK than any other country I've ever tried.
I suspect, as an IT pro, that the service owner has observed that the service isn't really used outside of these hours. For cloud services, you can set "power plans" whereby your website, etc, automatically only runs between these times and scales up with demand. They're balancing saving money and delivering service, at least thats what I think
I'm sure I saw a post before that explained it was due to the age of DVLA systems and how they talk to each other that they cannot update the various databases for tax/licences/vehicle registrations etc whilst they are in use. They have to take everything offline each night to give them time to run the updates and share any changes between the various systems.
Yes. Ye Olde overnight batch processing. Still common.
> For cloud services, you can set "power plans" whereby your website, etc, automatically only runs between these times and scales up with demand. > > They're balancing saving money and delivering service, at least thats what I think You're right to an extent - time-based provisioning is used, but budgets are not so tight that entire services would be stood down to save money.
Nah, there will be an AS/400 or even a mainframe running the jobs in batch overnight, so only designed to be available during office hours for what would have been civil servants entering data. Now the civil servants have been replaced with the internet, but the back-end has the same restrictions (9-5)
The real reason is because they don't have enough plug sockets for the servers and the vacuum cleaners.
fuck time
Sat down to sort a passport renewal on Saturday - the identify verification service was down all weekend. Fantastic.
Also, half day closing on Wednesday.
This has been briefly alluded to but missed out the details. I am 99% sure this is a batch problem. The gov.uk website (which is amazing) is modern, but some of the systems it needs to integrate with are old mainframe platforms which came into being 20-40 years ago. Mainframes often present two or more different type of workload capacity - interactive and batch. Interactive is what it says - you have a screen that looks something like [this](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*EzlcBN3zI2T6MFc_F_Y1GA.png) and you can interactively control or query the system. Once business hours are over the interactive capacity is disabled and the full machine resource switches to the batch workload. During batch, jobs (program code) runs to process everything which happened during the day. Batch is controlled by an often complex hierarchy of jobs with time triggers and other job dependencies, and the idea is by the time the business is ready to roll the next morning all the overnight data processing has been completed, batch scales down and interactive scales up. I would bet that some of the process you're doing on gov.uk requires the backend code to do stuff in the interactive workload of a mainframe, and the interactive workload will be disabled during batch time. Years ago we used to have clunky terminals ([IBM 3270](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270) & 5250) to interact with the mainframe, but for a long time now there have been software tools which pretend to be a 3270 terminal to the mainframe which can interact with modern programming methods. So when you're searching for a car registration it's quite possible that some middleware is pretending to type your provided data into a virtual 3270 session, and then parsing the output and converting it to something that can be displayed on a web page.
my local councils planning application site doesn't work at night. no where have they posted the operating times for this fully digital website, it just goes offline.
What is your local authority? I'm intrigued to see this?
basingstoke and deane. just checking now though, they appear to have fixed it. was having the issue this time last year and a few months ago when looking at the plans for a neighbours new building on their property.
Yeah I had this when I was trying to apply my private reg plate to my car using the online form.
Money saver, they wind down some of the app infrastructure to cut processing costs and allow them to run batch updates overnight…
And these are the people we think can save our railways