How to Block Calling on a Holiday in VICIdial

Some states ban telemarketing on specific holidays, and the calendar shifts every year. The awkward part inside VICIdial is that there is no per-state no-call-day scheduler - you cannot tick a box that says do not dial Louisiana on July 4. What you can do is borrow the call time scheme, the same control that already enforces your Permitted calling hours and any Calling curfew, and temporarily make a state un-callable for a single day. This is purely a scheduling change, so your DNC (do not call) filtering and lead data stay untouched.

The 2400 to 2400 trick

Call times in VICIdial are stored as start and stop values for each day of the week, written in 24-hour form. Normal business hours look like 0900 to 2100, and the restrictive state schemes - Louisiana at 0900 to 2000 with no Sunday calling, for example - are already built into the basic install. The trick is that if you set both the start and the stop to 2400, the dialer has a zero-length window and places no calls at all. So to block a holiday for one state, you edit that state's call time record and set the relevant day to 2400 start and 2400 stop. No window, no calls. The dialer treats that state as outside its allowed hours for the entire day, regardless of how aggressive your dial level is.

Do not edit the call time scheme your whole Campaign runs on directly, because that would stop every state. Instead use the per-state record for the affected state and activate that state record inside your campaign's selected call time scheme. That keeps the block scoped to just the one state on just the one day. If you are new to how these records and schemes fit together, the VICIdial compliance overview lays out the call time model, and the holiday rules post tells you which days to block.

Step by step

• Open the state call time record for the affected state.
• Set that holiday's weekday start and stop to 2400 and 2400.
• Activate that state call time record in the campaign's selected call time scheme.
• Confirm no calls are placed to that state on the day.
• The next day, revert the record to the state's normal hours.

The flow

flowchart LR
  A[Identify holiday and state] --> B[Open state call time record]
  B --> C[Set day to 2400 2400]
  C --> D[Activate in campaign scheme]
  D --> E[No calling that day]
  E --> F[Next day revert to normal hours]
  F --> G[State callable again]

The diagram captures the whole loop: set the block, activate it, let the holiday pass with no calls, then put the hours back the following day. The revert step matters - if you forget it, you will silently keep that state dark long after the holiday is over.

Set a reminder for the revert so a one-day block does not become a one-week outage, and keep your underlying Call times documented per state so you always know what normal looks like before you change it. Write down the original start and stop values somewhere before you overwrite them, because the fastest way to restore a state after the holiday is to type the known-good numbers straight back in rather than guessing. If you run several campaigns off the same scheme, double-check that the block lands where you intend and nowhere else. VICIfast preloads the restrictive state call times and helps you script these one-off blocks. See pricing for a dialer that handles the fiddly state rules for you.