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Admin
Fantastic story, apart from the tortured first paragraph (which makes me feel like I'm missing out on some inside joke). Once upon a time I would have said that people printing and writing on web forms would be too ridiculous to happen...sadly I've met people that make this story all to believable.
Admin
"challenged" that they do not know what a web application is, you have a team of stupid or fossil coders.
Admin
In before the wooden table comment.
Admin
I bet someone will think that now scanning his comment on a piece of paper and posting that picture here will make a witty comment.
Admin
First comment at DWTF, yay!
I just wanted to say that I use BZ for maintenance on my largest hobby site - the one that actually has a volunteer staff to manage - and while it's not the most user-friendly tool in the world for people not fully in the web-production world, I'm reasonably sure even my staff knows not to mail me completed bugs.
Admin
I want to call BS on this. I really do. Unfortunately, I've ran into too many people who do stupid crap like this to not believe it.
Seeing stuff like this makes me want to change careers to something that is less taxing on my patience - lion taming, for example.
Admin
This guy's approach is still better than our old issue tracker that was built on LOTUS NOTES! Seriously.
Admin
After spending several weeks creating two complex online questionnaires for colleagues, I had a similar feeling. The first one printed out the questionnaire and mailed it to people - but also helpfully gave the URL for anyone still wanting to do it online. That would have worked fine, had she actually copied the URL accurately; getting the domain name wrong didn't help.
The second one did actually manage to get a few people to visit. Of course, the fact one question consisted of something like 27 rows and 9 columns of radio buttons and text boxes to fill probably explains why almost everyone who saw the page ran away screaming, rather than completing it...
On the bright side, I suppose, only the first of the two actually bought and asked me to install a special-purpose statistics package with which to analyze the nine responses she did get to her multiple-choice questions.
Admin
Hasn't anyone heard of Trac? I mean seriously?
Admin
How can anyone in the world be so dumb and not forget to breathe?!
Admin
Admin
i'm currently working off a 13 sheet excel project plan. it uses 11 different background colours, one for each resource. i'm pink twinkle
Admin
Considering it was their old issue tracker, Trac may not have even existed at the time.
Admin
What do you mean "built on LOTUS NOTES?" You can make really good applications in Lotus Notes, and you can make really crappy applications in it.
Admin
I'm currently working for a big company providing IT services to banks, and they also use a self-rolled Notes-based bug tracking. In fact, it got a major update recently.
It's tailored to the company's needs, which include lots of specific fields, the ability to have bug reports visible only to specific user groups, and even having certain fields only visible to specific user groups.
The only real WTF in the system is its handling of concurrent modifications, which sucks.
Admin
Admin
Perhaps I've been sheltered from the evil in the world, but I just can't believe this is true.
Admin
I concur. (Hello, everyone, my name is xxxxxxx and I'm a former Notes CLP)
Admin
I concur. (Hello, everyone, my name is xxxxxxx and I'm a former Notes CLP)
Admin
Our CURRENT issue tracker is built on Lotus Notes! This is a Fortune 500 transportation company!
Even worse, many of the managers refuse to use it! Worst of all, it's only because of laziness, not hatred of Scrotus Notes!
Admin
Would it be wittier if it was a picture of a printed screenshot take on a wooden table?
Admin
Damn, forgot to quote.
Admin
What are you saying? Don't you know that Lotus Notes has a rock-solid core? If you have problems with Lotus Notes, I think it's clearly a case of you using it wrong![/u]. After all, it's [i]groupware. You should have used the powerful API to fix it yourself!
(In case anybody's sarcasm detector is on the fritz... yeah. Check out those samples. I have a buddy mucking about with the notes API to prove he can make a better mail interface than the one that ships. It's painful to watch.)
Admin
Admin
Ah, the introduction explains perfectly TDWTF's namechange shenanigans: thinking "red" meant "the public would love to have another namechange", one ensued (of course with the name designated "pink" by the focus group). The subsequent listing of "readers' desire for namechanges" to "seething black", made another one inevitable.
Admin
sure, laugh at the first paragraph, but i used to work for a company that did that. it was a web development firm, and clients would email the developers directly, and it was up to the developer to find someway to keep track of tasks. and most of us choose some unique method with flagging stuff in outlook.
the most frustrating thing is that there's no way to track any meaningful metric(like how many work items you're responsible for). i left on vacation for a week which ruined my system. I never quite got control of it afterwards.
Admin
hm...... what happened to the error messages the guy was getting :P?
Admin
Clearly, Byron's colleague is a master of the "Paperfull Office" concept. I bow in his general direction.
Admin
and so on. Seriously, we make small batches of semi-custom industrial sensors, but the production test department has been de-skilled to the point where the 'technicians' don't even know what a resistor does. Fault-finding consists of randomly changing components and then giving up and throwing it to us in R&D. I could go on...
PS a 'resistor' is a hardware thing, for you Enterprisey guys ;)
Admin
writing the comment in word printing out the word document putting the print-out in a folder getting angry because nobody replys on my ingenious comment
Admin
I'm really confused why those people are not let go by managers... no.. seriously.. to those people, there should be given no chance to fix themselves... because they are simply too stupid.. :-|
Admin
As a user I always assumed that Notes must have hidden merits as there surely aren't any visible ones. As a mail client it is essentially unproductivityware and barely seems to evolve over the eight years since I first had to suffer it.
Admin
Unfortunately, in my experience most of them are of the latter type. (Actually, all of them in my experience, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt here.)
Admin
You think the business world is a meritocracy?
Admin
Admin
Heh. I should have known this was going to spark some controversy.
Oh, by the way, did you guys know that .999...=1? runs
Admin
For us "Enterprisey guys" a "resistor" is usually someone in middle-management.
Admin
It is a heater for the rest of the board. See, if the circuit board isn't kept at the right temp, the magic smoke will come out.
Admin
Hmmmm.
I don't know about Trac, but I've been using Mantis for a few years now and I rather like it.
It still astonishes me how many development teams use Excel to track bugs. Every interview I always ask what software or processes are used to track bugs and at least 50% or more rely on Outlook or Excel.
Strange.
Admin
Admin
With apologies to Lt. Frost, Im amused by all this calling BS. Frankly nothing I've read on this site in almost a year has been unbelievable. Just yesterday, a user asked me how to display two web pages side by side. Nothing special like locked scrolling, just show two similar web pages side by side on the screen. Uh. open two browser windows and resize them?
I could overlook the fundamental lack of computing knowledge save for the fact this user develops mission/safety critical transportation automation.
Admin
Admin
What weirds me out is the Microsoft Word document in the attachments. Did they really upload it into Bugzilla, only to print BOTH out and staple them together? This is some serious WTF right here.
Admin
Admin
The whole will still be crap though.
Admin
I fear you are making the classic mistake of confusing lions with anteaters.
Actual lions evoke a lot of emotions, but bored annoyance is not a very common one, or not for long.
Admin
OMG...
If this is real and I believe in any kind of God at all then I have to believe that some buearacrat forced those people to use the filing cabnit.
Because if a programmer, no, a group of programmers did something like that then we're all doomed. One of those idiots is gonna get employed by the goverment to write the new minuteman launch safety protocol application and we're all gonna die.
Admin
In a career like lion taming, it's not my patience that I'd be worried about.
At least in this career field my clients are much less likely to devour me.
Admin
On NOTEs. We are using an in-house Notes app for bug tracking. It is a fully indexed, searchable DB with about 20000 documents. It can perform very complicated queries in seconds, including wonderful things like "mouse NEAR scroll". They have implemented an exclusive locking scheme to avoid the concurrent update issue another user mentioned. I am dreading moving to a web-based application because I don't see an easy way to copy/paste screen shots to a web app.
Notes fat client: Alt+PrntScrn, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V.
WebApp: Alt+PrntScrn, Run Paint, Ctrl+V, Save the file to disk, exit Paint, Click on Attach, browse for the file, Upload.
I am planning on pitching SnagIt or something similar, but it will still be about twice the number of steps. Any other product recommendations?
Notes Pro: Multivalue fields are extremely powerful.
Notes Con: Not many people know how to leverage it.I once had a certified, "3 years of Notes experience" programmer in a class who did not realize that Notes supported functions/subroutines. She would write multi-THOUSAND line programs in a "top down" fashion. Maybe she wrote some of those bad Notes apps.
Notes Caution: You have to take enough drugs to deaden the SQL/Relational part of your brain before you design your Notes database. It is a field-based, document database. Trying to implement a relational design will kill any hope of a good Notes application.
Admin
Ohhhh. I thought a resistor was somebody who refused to use the new software package.