Blocking an Hour Was Costing Me the Day

By Junaid Ahmed

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Two bugs this week, both in the same corner of the booking page, both losing me hours I actually had available.

One

Blocked Dates lets me block a window. Tuesday, 2pm to 3pm, dentist. The settings page even shows it back to me as "2:00 - 3:00", a window, not a day.

The public booking page ignored the window. It saw a block exists on Tuesday and took Tuesday off entirely. Every open hour that day disappeared from the page a guest actually sees. I never noticed, because from my side the setting looked exactly right.

Two

I cancelled a booking. The guest and I had already moved it. But that slot stayed dark on my booking page, permanently. The page was counting cancelled bookings as conflicts, so an hour I'd deliberately freed up was still being held by a meeting that wasn't happening.

Both of these fail quietly. Nothing errors. You just get fewer bookings and never find out why.

What changed

Block an hour, lose an hour. A 2pm-3pm block now takes 2pm-3pm, and the rest of the day stays open. Block a whole day, leave the times empty, and you still get the whole day, same as before.

Cancel a booking and the slot comes back. Pending, confirmed, and completed bookings still hold their time, as they should.

The one I'm most glad I found

While fixing the first one, I found its mirror image: if a block had a start time but no end time, half-filled, easy to do, the system ignored it completely. Not "blocked the whole day," but blocked nothing. That's the direction you never want a scheduling bug to point, because it means someone could book straight over something you'd tried to protect.

A half-filled block now takes the whole day. If I typed a start time, I meant to block something, and the safe reading of a half-finished instruction is more blocked, not less.

What's next

There's a related rough edge I haven't fixed yet: when the page checks whether a slot collides with an existing booking, it assumes every booking is 45 minutes long, even when it isn't. A 90-minute recording only defends the first 45 of itself. That one's next.

Your calendar only earns trust if the answer it gives is the same answer you'd give. Both of these were the page speaking for me and getting it wrong in opposite directions.