The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

This Router Says **** You

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-04

Denilson uses a password manager, like one should. Except there was a router which simply would not let the password manager fill the password field. Sure, Denilson could just copy and paste, but the question of why remained.

And that meant checking the HTML and JavaScript code the router served up. Just pulling up the dev tools brought up all sorts of "fun" discoveries. For example, the application was built in Vue, a front-end framework. But in addition to using Vue, it also used jQuery for some DOM manipulations. But it didn't just use jQuery. It loaded jquery-3.5.1.slim.min.js directly from its static files. It also loaded vendor.js which also contained the same version of jQuery. At least it was the same version.

12 comments - Last comment @ 14:10

A Percise Parser

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-03

Thomas worked for a company based in Germany which was looking to expand internationally. Once they started servicing other locales, things started to break. It didn't take long to track the problem down to a very "percise" numeric parser.

handleInput( value ){
   let value_ = value;
   if( value.substring( 0, 1 ) === '+' ){
      value_ = value.substring( 1 );
   }

   value_ = value_.split( '.' ).join( '' );

   if( this.usePercisionIfPercentage && value_.indexOf( ',' ) >= 0 ) {
      const parsedPreValue = value_.split( ',' )[ 0 ];
      const parsedCommaValue = parseInt( value_.split( ',' )[ 1 ], 10 ) < 10 ?
         parseInt( value_.split( ',' )[ 1 ], 10 ) * 10 : value_.split( ',' )[ 1 ].substring( 0, 2 );

      if( parsedCommaValue === 0 ) {
         value_ = parseInt( parsedPreValue, 10 );
      }
      else {
         const parsedValue = parseInt( parsedPreValue + parsedCommaValue, 10 );
         value_ = parseInt( parsedValue, 10 ) / 100;
      }
   }
   
   // do stuff with value_
}

12 comments - Last comment @ 09:29

Wages of Inheritance

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-02-02

Tim H writes:

Some say that OOP was the greatest mistake of all. I say they weren't trying hard enough.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-03

Honorable Conjunctions

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-01-29

Doreann has touched this particular function many, many times. In all those times, she never noticed this particular little line, dropped in by a third-party contractor that has long since cashed their check and wandered off to other things.

(user?.betaMode || !user?.betaMode) && (specialRuleCode())

18 comments - Last comment @ 2026-01-31

A Field Terned Visible

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-01-28

Today's anonymous submitter sends us some C# code. This particular block of code controls whether two different columns are visible on the screen. If the field Dist_Por equals one set of constants, we display one column, if it equals a different constant, we display the other. Seems simple enough.

My question to you is this: how many nested ternaries do you need to solve this problem?

18 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-02

We Get Spam

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-01-27

I recognize that our comments system here leaves much to be desired, especially with regards to the spam filter. Lots of good comments get moderated, an annoying quantity of spam gets through. But today, I want to take a moment to talk about some of the spam we get. Because we get a lot. And since most of you never see it as most of it hits our moderation queue, I don't think you can appreciate how weird some of the spam we get is. Formatting preserved, but links- where they were present- stripped.

We'll start with one of my "favorites", the sycophant:

29 comments - Last comment @ 11:07

Threading the Needle in a Haystack of Files

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-01-26

Today we return to Jessica (previously), who still suffers under Windows Forms. But it's not all Windows Forms. There's also random CLI tools kicking around. CLI tools which should really be designed to run as a service,

Let's start with the Main method of this particular tool.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2026-02-02

Validation Trimmed Away

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-01-22

Grace sends us, in her words, "the function that validates the data from the signup form for a cursed application."

It's more than one function, but there are certainly some clearly cursed aspects of the whole thing.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2026-01-31