• David (unregistered)

    The real WTF was that it was really a hardware problem. With enterprise level HW, the old new name would have worked.

    Not.

    [Captcha? All I can see is a black block. Anyone got a light? Beware grues.]

  • nick (unregistered)

    oh all these while i didn't know WorseThanFailure == WTF

  • Dennis (unregistered)

    Unfortunately, all aspects of the production environment were not taken into consideration.

    Well isn't that just typical.

    That's the real wtf. "...all aspects of the production environment were not taken into consideration."

    It would have been bad enough if "...not all...were taken."

  • Mark (unregistered)

    I've been reading this site for a long while, and honestly, I preferred "worse than failure" to this. Acronyms in a site's title are THE DEVIL.

  • Pre-mortem (unregistered)

    Oh My God! Wow! I can't believe that the findings from your post-mortem were exactly the same as the ones we have in my company after every single project! LOL!

    Of course, the real WTF is that post-mortems are not Agile enough - you should be holding a retrospective instead. After you have discussed with yourself in a no-blame environment, as you are in a "safe space", you can then report back to management as follows:

    What worked well for us? The team dealt superbly with the iterative customer requirements, facilitating multiple stories to deliver increasingly sophisticated branding during the lifecycle of the project, in response to emergent user needs.

    What didn't work so well? The product users were not as Agile in their response to the dynamic product branding, due to lack of understanding of the Agile process.

    What will we do differently next time? Be more Agile - although changing the branding was successful, a re-education program for users is underway to make them think in a more Agile manner, which will result in adoption of similar successful methodologies enterprise-wide.

    Energy Seismograph

                                     x         x        x       x      x       x
                       x                                                        x
              x                                                                 x
        x                                                                       x
    x                                                                           x
x                                                                               x     x     x     x     x      x
  • TknoSpz (unregistered)

    How about you just have two sites. Present those that enter at worsethanfailure.com to the pretty-clean-and-can-have-it-posted-at-work folks and thedailywtf.com for the cussing-is-part-of-who-I-am-dammit folks.

    I bet the comments would be similarly different.

    I never stopped calling it theDailyWTF. Probably 'cause that's the first thing I say when I come across the code scrambles this site shows off. Well, maybe I didn't include the daily part.

  • ChiefCrazyTalk (unregistered) in reply to quamaretto
    quamaretto:
    Dave:
    Thought you could outsmart us, eh? It didn't work for KFC, and it won't work for you!

    KFC?

    You know - they used to be called "Kentucky Fried Chicken", until the US government forced them to change the name since the genetically modified animals they were selling could not legally be called "Chicken".

  • Nathan (unregistered)

    Is this copout copyrighted? Can I make derivative works from this for my own screw ups... It is brilliantly done and applicable in so many situations.

  • wolfy (unregistered) in reply to user

    So let us rejoice!

    Here's to another sweet victory over sheer political correctness!

    Long live (thedaily)WTF!

    PS: I knew it ;o)

  • Smegzor (unregistered)

    I never stopped calling it The Daily What The F**k

  • WTF (unregistered)

    Next time, YAGNI, dude.

  • Aditya (unregistered)

    I wonder whether the Alex of early 2008 is going to go one up on the Alex of late 2007 and come up with a New, New, New, New Name.

  • Penguin (unregistered)

    Spelling out "Worse Than Failure" makes it easier for me to share some of the articles with my high school computer science students. Please consider spelling it out once again so it is obviously school appropriate.

    Thank you.

  • vt_mruhlin (unregistered) in reply to Penguin
    Penguin:
    Spelling out "Worse Than Failure" makes it easier for me to share some of the articles with my high school computer science students. Please consider spelling it out once again so it is obviously school appropriate.

    Thank you.

    Can't you just lie to the kids and tell them that's what it stands for?

    / Why does the new URL hate my old cookies? I hate these captchas but am too lazy to login.

  • Cpt (unregistered)

    Erm... /we/ have learned lessons? Just who do you refer to as you speak of 'we'? I for one do not belong to the 'we' group as implied by you, and rest assured that the term 'you' could be read as both singular as plural ;)

  • (cs) in reply to gabba
    gabba:
    I trust you've learned your lesson about using such undisciplined agile site renaming processes. Using a rigorous waterfall model, though perhaps slower and more expensive, would have resulted in a higher quality product.

    That, or it will make a whopper of a WTF.

  • Aleksi Suhonen (unregistered)

    WTF?!?

  • immibis (unregistered)

    What's wrong with Worse than Failure? I liked that name!

  • (cs) in reply to Fish Basket Gordo

    The Daily File Not Found

  • Rick E. (unregistered)

    Unfortunately, by the very nature of this whole travesty you yourself have become the Daily WTF.

    All those ad dollars, meh. Best of luck with your next venture.

  • Liz (unregistered)

    Yesssss! Thank you. The other name just wasn't right.

  • anoncowherd (unregistered)

    Just like everyone else, I always thought that The Daily WTF (as in what the..) was a most glamorous name.

    But the most important thing is this site, of course. Without it, the programming world would be .. incomplete!

    I wonder if there's still enough WTFery going on to keep the articles juicy though?

    In any case, good luck!

  • AnonyMouse (unregistered)

    Brillant!

  • {{MyName-macro}} (unregistered)

    The guy's a comedian :-D

  • Lain_13 (unregistered)

    I think we need to rename site once more for the great justice! What you think 'bout "Teh WTF!" ? ;)

  • Tei (unregistered) in reply to Fish Basket Gordo

    I guest that boot.ini has already been taken...

  • Rolf (unregistered)

    I've never stopped naming the site "the daily wtf", and the URL never stopped working, so I'm glad the new,new name reflects the old name again. "WTF?" is a much more accurate description of the feeling the original engineer had when being confronted with these situations.

    I never liked the way too soft "Worse than Failure" name. Good to see the daily WTF back in action, and the improved new Alex is showing.

  • Stiggy (unregistered)

    Coming next week, the New, New, New Name, 'File Not Found'

  • Tom Melly (unregistered) in reply to Fish Basket Gordo
    Fish Basket Gordo:
    It's almost as if this whole exercise in name changing was, in and of itself, designed to be fodder for the site's content: a meta-WTF.

    I never meta WTF I didn't like...

  • Ch0 (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Wait, the site name changed? I been coming here from www.thedailywtf.com the whole time. There was no new name.

    Well done on an amazing piece of doublethink.

  • (cs)

    Hmm, I seem to have ended up with a sticker for "The Daily Worse Than Failure" - those must be pretty rare!

    /me heads off to ebay

  • (cs)

    It has always been TheDailyWTF for me and a lot of others so, its time to yell w00t !!

  • Gabelstaplerfahrer (unregistered)

    There's only one thing that can REALLY make your new new new name stand out more and look more 'new' than it ever was before, and that's by adding the obligatory web 2.0 labels and look to it!

    So a BETA and a 2.0 label need to be added, a mirrored shade on the bottom and preferably some kind of shiny glow to the dull red and white surface need to be implemented. That way, everybody can see just how new your website is after the name changes!

  • Mark B (unregistered) in reply to Fish Basket Gordo

    History is doomed to repeat its self

    Prince > £$%£ > Prince Royal Mail > Consignia > Royal Mail AT&T > Cingular > AT&T The Daily WTF > Worse Than Failure > The Daily WTF

  • Santtu Lakkala (unregistered)

    Mad props to the New Alex for getting the name back to the good one. While the reasoning behind the evvil name change had some valid points and the article that tried to assume everyone (even though failing) was very well written, the original name just simply rocks.

    I hope that after all this name changing, you have an enterprisey name changing software, that passes the new name at least via fax, email, secretary and of course xml. Also, I hope you have a automatic digital camera installed above the printer output tray, so you can get the new site logos automatically, instead of needing to manually print, take photo, crop, upload (while this would be an ideal job for an intern, the current trend seems to be that the use age of a name gets shorter and shorter, doing the manual process several times an hour would need quite a few interns).

  • Cian (unregistered) in reply to CynicalTyler

    If free stickers can't make a Name Change work, nothing can. That's it boys. Close down the factory. There's no point in working any more.

    Every time I hear "stickers" and "name change", I think "ITV Digital" (not that anyone more than 100 miles from the UK will get that reference)

  • leo (unregistered)

    Hey, I like how the "Not Enough QA/Testing" header comes right after "it’s virtually to implement such an undertaking in today’s competitive market."

    Sorry, just had to point that out.

  • D1 (unregistered)

    Just goes to show that when the requirements change regularly the best option can often be to sit back, do no development and wait for the merry-go-round to turn full circle and leave you exactly where you started.

    You don't have to do any work and you might even get an apology for messing you around when in fact it's been like a little holiday.

    Marketing departments are the most fickle in my experience and regularly make a series of decisions that lead back to the beginning.

    Of course there's always the slight risk that it won't turn full circle but a few 'technical issues' can often be enough to finally kill off the change especially when explained to non-tech types.

  • Phil B (unregistered)

    IIRC This all started when Early 2007 Alex got a bit embarrased explaining to his grandma what his famous site was called and why.

    He should have said something along the lines of "WTF stands for 'What Terrible Formating' in computer circles, although some childish types use a different interpretation."

    A purely marketing thing then. The WTF here is that E2007A attempted to resolve this issue by altering code and domain names etc. Hopefully L2007A comes bundled with a BS2007A to cover marketing issues.

  • (cs)

    Hello, I'm willing to architect and develop an enterprise name changing solution for you. It will leverage the synergies of all the newest technologies to address all of the often overlooked problems of name changing. It will use AJAX with SOAP through HTTP to retrieve XML data from a special distributed data storage system, and using dynamic javascript, will rewrite all the code in real time where it finds instances of the old name, this way transferring the performance costs to the client, allowing your server to perform more efficiently.

    It will also automatically build your logo using our patented Tablemap, consisting of a large grid of dynamically generated 1 pixel table cells. It's an innovation of ours that I assure no-one else on the internet uses.

    You'll be able to easily change names by writing it down on a piece of paper, putting it on a wooden table*, taking a picture, uploading it to the server through our NMS (Name Managing System), where it will be OCRed, transferred through highly encrypted** tunneling to multiple name review teams of various ethnical backgrounds, which will then issue a validity certificate for your name. This will certify that your name complies with all name-attributing standards.

    The solution will cost 12 million USD, which will be easily offset by the savings that our solution will offer in your name-changing endeavours.

    • Wooden table required for OCR process ** We ROT13 the data at least 1000 times for maximum security
  • (cs)
  • fugu5 (unregistered)

    I'm more than happy to see the old-new name! :)

  • (cs) in reply to Gordon
    Gordon:
    Update the title in the RSS feed already :P

    P.S. All Hail The Daily WTF!

    Yup, still Worse Than Failure. Wait... isn't renaming the site but not the RSS feed a WTF in and of itself? Or is it a Worse Than Failure in and of itself?

    Crap, now I'm confused... :P

  • longeasy (unregistered)

    Great post and congratulations for returning to the real name!

  • (cs) in reply to Fish Basket Gordo

    Good. I was getting close to changing the link from my website reflecting the 'new' name. Glad I was stubborn enough to keep referring to daily WTF. :P

  • TBon (unregistered)

    Oh, no.... the new^3 url takes 4 times as many letters to type in for firefox to suggest it as the "new" did.

    I only needed to type "w" for worsethanfailure.com to be the top suggestion, but now I have to type a whole 4 letters, "thed" for thedailywtf.com to come to the top, there being a few other sites starting with "the" that I regularly visit...

    This last new change is clearly a step back in terms of typing effiency! (But then, reading this site is allready such a drastic set back in overall productivity it's probably not measurable. Besides, I've probably hit more keys / spent more time typing this comment as I would in a year of typing "thed" instead of simply "w"....)

  • brrrrrrr (unregistered)

    My idea would have been to give the site TWO NAMES!! Show the "The Daily WTF" logo for www.thedailywtf.com and the "Worse Than Failure" logo for www.worsethanfailure.com.

    Ofcourse, the website www.thedailywtf.com would replace all text "Worse Than Failure" to "The Daily WTF" and www.worsethanfailure.com would replace the text vice versa.

  • WTF (unregistered) in reply to Fish Basket Gordo

    But the real WTF is that it has not yet been called TheRealWTF.com

  • Patrick (unregistered) in reply to Mithras

    You're all blind! The site changed to using high-fructose corn syrup on the backend!

  • wtf (unregistered)

    when i access the site through thedailywtf.com it now gives me a message to enable cookies instead of the "full articles" link at the top. they are enabled, of course.

    and you had a similar problem the last time you changed names and domains...

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