Board Game Arena

I’m new to BGA and have already been kicked out of 3-4 games because I had the audacity to sleep eight hours out of every 24.

Is it possible to set my account to indicate I will not be making turns between say, midnight and eight AM?

No, it's not an account setting. It's a per-table setting. You're supposed to check the playing hours and speed of the tables you join before you join them.

Playing hours only apply to fast turn-based games.

If you are looking for a turn-based game from the game page, and have the game speed set to a slow turn-based option but also have "flexible" enabled, playing hours won't be visible as an option at all (that only shows up when you've selected fast turn-based), and you can be dropped into a turn-based game of any speed with any playing hours. If you've set a fast turn-based speed, there's an additional setting for playing hours, but if you mark that "flexible" you can again be dropped in to a game with any playing hours. (IMO this UI is terrible.)

For turn-based games that aren't prearranged I suggest using the "play now" lobby. If you're using automatic matching there, under the gear menu you can set specific ranges of acceptable speeds and playing hours, including four levels of preference for the matchmaking system to use if it's taking a long time to find you a game. Alas, you have to set these separately for every game, but they are retained per-game until you explicitly reset them.

There are a bunch of bug & suggestion reports filed complaining about how fast turn-based games are created, described, or marked, and how people think it could be improved. Searching https://boardgamearena.com/bugs for BGA website and "fast turn-based" will get you many of them.

(Possibly it's worth starting a discussion thread comparing the various suggestions.)

If you use Manual game selection ("PLAY NOW", then set the filters to "SIMPLE/TURN-BASED/MANUAL"), you can see the time parameters before you enter a game.

You could also create your own invitation and set the playing hours/rate to whatever you would like.

To be clear to other newbies who find this thread: playing hours for fast-turn-based games are set based on the time zone of the player creating the game, but open invitations show the time zones in the viewer's time zone. You never need to know what your GMT offset is. If you set a game to run in the afternoon/evening (13:00 - 1:00). a player eight time zones away would see the hours as 21:00 - 9:00 (if they're looking).