• Smrt (unregistered) in reply to Ed McMahon
    Ed McMahon:
    Kaelten:
    2 for <=£2.50
    Oh, damn, that looks like math! Better not try that with dollars or you'll scare most of the customers away.

    Must say, I agree.

    The average monkey in the shops would be frightened away by the 'less than' sign - many people with only the most basic Math (ie school level) have tried to shut it out of their lives, and would panic when faced with such symbols, and not buy the product in case it means something terribly evil (I know many who would assume it's some sort of clever marketing ploy).

    2 for $2.50 on the other hand, they don't seem to realise is a clever marketing ploy (and some are even stupid enough to buy)....

  • Swimmer (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Larry:
    PeriSoft:
    Hopefully they weren't being helped along by a genius like you who thinks it's justice to piss in peoples' swimming pools.
    Don't piss in mine and I won't piss in yours. Simple enough, no?
    If they can have no smoking areas in restaurants, why not a no pissing area in a pool?

    "There's no P in my 'ool....Please keep it that way"

  • KP (unregistered) in reply to m0ffx
    m0ffx:
    "While looking for a car park I was presented with this strange error message," writes Michael Knight.

    Since that photo is evidently taken in a car park, why the heck was Michael looking for one? Did he not realise he'd already found what he sought?

    Perhaps he was Australian.

    English Parking Space = Australian Car Park

    English Car Park = Australian Parking Lot or Parking Garage

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to KP
    KP:
    m0ffx:
    "While looking for a car park I was presented with this strange error message," writes Michael Knight.

    Since that photo is evidently taken in a car park, why the heck was Michael looking for one? Did he not realise he'd already found what he sought?

    Perhaps he was Australian.

    English Parking Space = Australian Car Park

    English Car Park = Australian Parking Lot or Parking Garage

    Um... what? In Australia, or at least where I'm from, a car park is an area containing many parking spaces.

    Alternatively, you can also refer to a single space as a "car park".

    Nobody (well, obviously not nobody, but you get the point) calls them parking lots or parking garages.

  • (cs)

    Capital One. What's in your resource file?

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to PeriSoft
    PeriSoft:

    I was a member of a large, privately owned forum which had a huge database, and whose server was getting disproportionately crushed by search requests. They couldn't afford a better server, so they instituted such a limit.

    What, Nasioc?

  • peter parker (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    KP:
    Perhaps he was Australian.

    English Parking Space = Australian Car Park

    English Car Park = Australian Parking Lot or Parking Garage

    Um... what? In Australia, or at least where I'm from, a car park is an area containing many parking spaces.

    Alternatively, you can also refer to a single space as a "car park".

    Nobody (well, obviously not nobody, but you get the point) calls them parking lots or parking garages.

    This.

  • (cs)

    42☎☂♿NO COMMENT LIB

  • (cs) in reply to Larry
    Larry:
    the "ReloadEvery" Firefox extension
    My Firefox has this feature built in. You probably don't need that TabbedBrowsing add-on either.
  • Darjien (unregistered) in reply to Kaelten
    Kaelten:
    Napoleon:
    The Tesco one isn't really a WTF. There were more kinds of crisps that were on the offer that could have given a saving if the different kinds were mixed. Putting "Walkers 6 pack crisps 2 for £2.50 unless the total cost is less than £2.50 in which case it'll just be the normal cost" would probably not fit on the label.

    2 for <=£2.50 :D

    I've see this labelling surprisingly often in my local Tesco..

    And they usually don't have any other products in the offer. They just have some seriously buggy "discounting" software.

    I see EUR1.99 each or 2 for EUR4.00 a lot on cola (I'm in .ie). CAPTCHA: suscipere (i suspect indeed)

    darjien

  • daniel (unregistered) in reply to Larry
    Larry:
    how much a full featured browser can do with their silly rules. Just get the "ReloadEvery" Firefox extension

    Why does a full featured browser need an extension? :D

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    The Tesco pic reminds me of a story: a produce stand beside a country road had a sign that said, "Pecans $1 per sack, or all you want $5". Customer stops in and carries one sack of pecans to the checkout stand.

    "Do you want any more?" asks the checker.

    "No," says the customer.

    "That'll be five dollars," says the checker.

    "You misunderstand me. I don't want any more, but I don't have all I want. I have more than I want".

    <Places 1 pecan and 1$ on the counter and walks away.>

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to ComputerForumUser
    ComputerForumUser:
    Jeez, I thought the 100 second limit would have been unintentional with the supposition that nobody would reasonably click search twice in five seconds, but then I saw all the angry admin replies here.

    Penalizing users would be somewhat reasonable if the mere act of requesting a search used a significant amount of resources. But when you're displaying the page saying they're searching too quickly, you've already stopped the action which placed such a load on the system.

    I know, people these days seem to have a sense of entitlement, but these people need to know that you can't just demand your users perform load balancing for you automatically, and not to take it personally if load peaks at certain times. If you don't like it, you can take your services and offer them to another group of people.

    I always hit that limit accidentally, again by accidentally submitting the form twice (using autocomplete). It irks me to no end.

    The javascript solution is nice, but fails if you have javascript disabled (noscript) to avoid all the nasty drive-by-download crap that seems to be popular (and since they often happen with ads, you can't be sure a legit site won't have one).

    Perhaps if they accommodated the accidental search scenario (i.e., make it say, 3 searches in 10 seconds), then users would be less irked.

    The other thing that gets me are forums where "search" is disabled for non-members. Asking users to search before posting is one thing, making them go through the rigamarole of registration to do a search usually ends badly (you made me go through this, I'm just going to post my question! Waste my time...).

  • WillowAnne (unregistered) in reply to Worf

    If searching crashes your server then just remove the search box. <whew> Now that that's done, evaluate why you don't get a more scalable solution, and be happy you've had enough people go by your crappy collectible action figures forum to give you high-class problems like load balancing.....

  • (cs) in reply to m0ffx
    m0ffx:
    "While looking for a car park I was presented with this strange error message," writes Michael Knight.

    Since that photo is evidently taken in a car park, why the heck was Michael looking for one? Did he not realise he'd already found what he sought?

    You must understand... for years, he's had a car to do all of his thinking for him...

  • (cs) in reply to Napoleon
    Napoleon:
    The Tesco one isn't really a WTF. There were more kinds of crisps that were on the offer that could have given a saving if the different kinds were mixed. Putting "Walkers 6 pack crisps 2 for £2.50 unless the total cost is less than £2.50 in which case it'll just be the normal cost" would probably not fit on the label.

    You hope it works that way. I used to work in a grocery store, and one time saw an alternative option for how it could work.

    Customer put two bags of product on the counter. First one rung up as $unit_price, second run up as $unit_price + $delta_for_sale. Customer complained, "Hey! Why did the register just charge me 15 cents extra for the second bag?" Cashier, mind numb from over 6 hours of cash register beeps all around her, responded, "Didn't you see the sale price? Two for $sale_price."

    Queue long argument, while all on-duty cashiers were at their registers and working - but not able to keep up with customer influx. After about five minutes, the customer at the other express lane suddenly asked, "Hey! Why did that piece of shit just charge me 15 cents extra for the second bag?"

    About this time, a store manager appeared, apologized to both customers, and let them have their product for the cost of one bag. He then instructed all the cashiers to allow anyone who had two bags of the cheapest variety of product to get the second bag free, until further notice. He then prowled off looking for a certain computer operator - and somehow conveyed by his visage that the computer operator wouldn't be happy to be found...

  • Tetha (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    Code Dependent:
    The Tesco pic reminds me of a story: a produce stand beside a country road had a sign that said, "Pecans $1 per sack, or all you want $5". Customer stops in and carries one sack of pecans to the checkout stand.

    "Do you want any more?" asks the checker.

    "No," says the customer.

    "That'll be five dollars," says the checker.

    "You misunderstand me. I don't want any more, but I don't have all I want. I have more than I want".

    <Places 1 pecan and 1$ on the counter and walks away.>

    In fact, I would buy all of they sacks of pecan. Since I want them all, I pay $5. Once I have them all, I am going to sit in front of the store and sell bags of pecans for.. say, $.5, so if they sold me more than 10 bags of pecans, I will end up with a lot of profit :)

  • MF (unregistered) in reply to Tetha

    hey, doesn't $.5 = .5c

  • (cs) in reply to ComputerForumUser
    ComputerForumUser:
    Penalizing users would be somewhat reasonable if the mere act of requesting a search used a significant amount of resources. But when you're displaying the page saying they're searching too quickly, you've already stopped the action which placed such a load on the system.

    I know, people these days seem to have a sense of entitlement, but these people need to know that you can't just demand your users perform load balancing for you automatically, and not to take it personally if load peaks at certain times. If you don't like it, you can take your services and offer them to another group of people.

    This is royal BS. If something is well within the range of normal operator/user performance, penalizing it heavily is a big usability no-no. I have looked at my proxy log, and when doing a quick stock review at the end of the day, I usually pull a new chart on google finance every 4 seconds. That's how long it takes to type the symbol, hit enter, wait for the new chart to display, glean what I wanted to glean, and repeat. If I make a typo, the reload will happen probably inside of a second -- people with fairly rudimentary touch-typing skills are aware of typos as soon as they happen, without having to look at what they wrote.

    Right after graduating high school I've opened a bank account, and got an ATM card for it. Some idiot savant programmed a limit to how quickly you could type the PIN (it was WBK in Poland). It quite literally would tell me that I was typing too fast and that I should try again, slower this time. Never mind that there is the three-retries-and-you-loose-the card. A PHB somewhere had to double-protect him/herself by imposing a speed limit on PIN entry, too. That's the same level of whatthefuckery as putting if (this == NULL) return; at the beginning of every C++ function, or testing twice for the same thing inside of if() "just to be sure".

    For 99.9% (easily) of PHP+database applications out there, if searches take too long, there's probably 2-100 times latent capacity available given fairly obvious algorithmic improvements (that'd account for half of the increase, in log scale); the rest of the increase comes from using something with better random access than a hard drive (RAM or SSD).

    Unless your application is in the top 0.01% tier, you'll gain more performance by learning what you should have known first and fixing the crap you have in front of you, than by pissing off the users and not fixing anything in the long run anyway.

    It's like leaving one lane open on the beltway (in Washington, DC) and hoping that the traffic jams will discourage enough people. Ain't gonna happen, but your house may accidentally get burned down for deciding so.

    Don't piss of the users if you haven't done your homework first.

    Cheers, Kuba

  • (cs) in reply to Beavis
    Beavis:
    The Internet. Serious Business.

    Course, nothing says "Stop" like an IP ban.

    Won't stop most saavy people, but it does get the point across.

    And here I thought most saavy people would get the message that they're not supposed to do something long before someone gets around to banning their IP.

  • josh (unregistered)

    someone must have smoked a bowl pack before broadcasting that...

  • (cs) in reply to nocturnal
    nocturnal:
    Larry:
    Websites that scold me for normal innocent behavior (searching twice...)

    In 5 seconds? Searching twice in 5 seconds is normal behavior?

    Larry:
    Just get the "ReloadEvery" Firefox extension and reload their lame search page every 5 seconds for a month or two.

    Wait, what?

    First of all, it will just increase your 'you must wait x seconds' time every time you do that and return a static page, thereby not hurting their server, and effectively removing your ability to search their site for the next 100 months.

    Second, if it DID hurt their business, then it's a Denial of Service attack, which I believe is a felony, with PRISON TIME.

    Allow me to remind you that access to websites is a privilege. You (or more likely, your parents) pay money for that privilege. Privileges can be given, and taken away. No website (with the possible exception of government sites) is under any obligation to specifically serve you. Whether they want you to search every 5 seconds or 50 seconds or 5 times per day is their prerogative. If you don't like it, then go somewhere else.

    Many websites have monitoring utilities to detect and track malicious usage. If you ever do this to any of my sites, I will report you to your ISP and block access at the router.

    You've got a good point, but then it could have very well been a bad search form on the site itself. I can name a few sites if you'd like that for some reason don't clear the search form after it complete leaving you with a field full of data that you can search for again by maybe doing like I do sometimes and clicking a button twice due to lag or whatever.

  • : hey josh... (unregistered) in reply to josh
    josh:
    someone must have smoked a bowl pack before broadcasting that...
    ...you still living in sacramento?

    captcha: illum -- a high-stress chillum?

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