• JM (unregistered) in reply to EPE
    EPE:
    That's a web page, you'll have to check the date anyhow, be it from a drop-down list or typed by the visitor.
    Forgetting this is in a big source of security WTFs in itself. "I know, I'll just use drop-down list and then I don't have to check any input anymore, because the user can't possibly do it wrong now." Of course, supplying bogus values to a form by manipulating the posted data is not something you need a CS degree for. (Some browsers even have plugins for this.) All input from a web page needs to be checked, regardless of what measures you took client-side to make sure the user can't screw up. That's just a courtesy to the user.
  • Cloak (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    The problem is not that it dates back 150 years, but that they use a drop down to do it. It's bad enough that they use three separate input fields for a date (come on, displaying a date format above and validating the input against that shouldn't be expected too much from everyone). However letting the user scroll like a maniac through an incredibly long list instead of just letting him type four digits is ridiculous.

    How do you want to validate 01/12/2007 against 12/01/2007? What is month, what day? OK, you could show the date format somewhere but the best is usually to use a calendar. Only in the present example with 150 years you might either use the combe (so you can use the mouse and don't need to go to the keyboard) or you actually let people type in a year (make sure it's 4 digits).

    Conclusion: there is no best solution.

  • (cs) in reply to rsynnott
    rsynnott:
    RE the Vista CD burner thing, I assume it's a case of the driver or hardware being a bit silly, rather than Vista itself.

    Yeah... Because we all know Vista is sane every other way, so how could it be Vista screwing up... Brillant

    As for the health thing... Maybe they have reason for people to enter details of deceased relatives from time to time (and perhaps used the same code to generate the form). That could be a sane reason for it. Or it could just be silliness.

  • (cs) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    So what if I am a turtle and was born in 1830, then I can't use their site? How unfair is that?

    Pure discrimination. I can't use their site either. I'm 300 years old. I'm The Highlander. Muaaahhaaahaaa.

  • Hans (unregistered) in reply to DeckerDK
    DeckerDK:
    VGR:
    Then you must be a fan of this.

    Hey, thats the complete Interface Hall of Shame - Thanks, I've been looking for that for years...

    Unfortunately it seems it has not seen any updates since 1999... Too bad, it was always an interesting read and I'm certain there is still plenty to write about. Indeed, this very website hosts many great examples of what not to do.

  • Gerald (unregistered) in reply to rsynnott
    rsynnott:
    RE the Vista CD burner thing, I assume it's a case of the driver or hardware being a bit silly, rather than Vista itself.

    Since I'm not writing a CD driver and/or am building a CD Burner. I'm a user, and from a user point of view: "It is Vista!"

  • (cs) in reply to TofuMatt
    TofuMatt:
    Well, the oldest living person is 114, so, no -- it's a WTF.
    So the requirements had to be that it went back for some time period greater than 114 years, and the time period of 150 years was arbitrarily chosen (I'm guessing because it was the lowest multiple of 50 that could be used). Not sure how having a few extra dates is "Worse Than Failure"... Would you have considered 120 years wrong as well? What about 125? Or should the developer hit the books and researched who the longest living human being is, and then hard coded that date as the earliest?
  • nerdierthanu (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Sgt. Preston:
    The too-few-years error reminds me of some sites that ask you to identify your whereabouts and list the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia, leaving no choices for people in Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, New Zealand, various other island nations, and (on the off chance) Antarctica.
    The companies could be located in the US, and broaden the categorization to continents for their international customers.

    Sgt. Preston is pointing out that those options don't include the continent of North America, but does include the US.

    I'd call that a pretty big WTF.

  • Anonymous Crowbar (unregistered) in reply to misguided

    That's what infrarecorder is for (Yes, it even has unicode support). http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net/

  • Izzy (unregistered) in reply to Fuji
    Fuji:
    Steve:
    I thought of that. It would make sense EXCEPT that the page is intended for people who have forgotten their user IDs. I seriously doubt any dead people will be using such a page.

    It seems to me that dead people would be the MOST likely to forget their user IDs.

    Many zombies and other undead creatures (judging from late night TV movies) have poor manual dexterity. They might find a scroll box easier to use than a keyboard.

  • (cs) in reply to VGR
    VGR:
    poochner:
    The fewer ways you give users to screw up, the better. Putting it in a drop-down isn't going to stop anybody who wants to mess with the site, but it will double check simple mistakes and stop twits (in the Monty Python sense).
    Then you must be a fan of this.

    I have no experience with Healthspace, but I have to wonder if perhaps they have (a few) records for deceased people that go back to 1857. That doesn't excuse a combobox with 150 items in it, but it would explain why dates going back that far are allowed to be entered.

    I didn't mean to imply (though on re-reading, I did imply) that I thought that drop-down was a good design. I certainly don't like the examples on the IHOS with the drop-down digits and so on. Just saying, that sometimes giving the user a little friendly guidance is a good thing. If you only have sales in certain countries, putting those in a list might be good, even if there are a lot of them. And yes, the application still has to recheck everything, every time. Any user input is suspect. I hate having to explain this repeatedly to "web application programmers" who should know better by now. "B-b-but the JavaScript validated it!"

    Nit: If the form is going to have separate fields for the NNN-MM-OOOO parts of a SSN (or similar), don't make me have to click or tab over to the next one. Especially don't require clicking because you've created some sort of random tab ordering. And for God's sake, allow spaces and dashes in CC numbers when they're being entered!

  • (cs)

    Eeek! My boyfriend is a developer for BEA! I'm gonna giggle at him for this! Hee hee!

    -- Seejay

  • NotanEnglishMajor (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    As someone who writes healthcare software for a living, I can tell you that going back 150 years isn't completely without merit. It is not uncommon to import or input historical data particularly with registries that look at longitudinal data.
    I thought of that. It would make sense EXCEPT that the page is intended for people who have forgotten their user IDs. I seriously doubt any dead people will be using such a page.

    Oh yeah! How can you be so sure dead people don't surf the web?

    -Notan.

  • doom (unregistered) in reply to Wene Girchinko
    Wene Girchinko:
    Gene Wirchenko:
    How useful was this bug? Definitely a five.

    All together now: "That's not a bug; that's a feature!"

    Sincerely,

    Gene Wirchenko

    As a software tester, I have the opposite opinion, naturally. My favorites are:

    1. "huh, funny, it works on my machine"
    2. "well, it compiled!"
    3. "sorry that is out of scope and does not apply to my code"

    Sincerely,

    Wene Girchinko

    "Works as coded!"

  • jayh (unregistered) in reply to Rick

    Absolutely true that a dropdown is a poor choice here.

    A dropdown is very useful when the typing is more cumbersome than searching. typing 4 digits (that a person has well committed in memory) is a lot faster than scrolling through the list and easily clicking on the wrong one.

  • Julia (unregistered)

    When my other half worked for the NHS, the patient databases at the time economised on space by having fixed two-digit age and date-of-birth fields. Twenty years before Y2K came on the scene, of course. This is a pretty tiny WTF in comparison...

    (The managers insisted that we should just plough on regardless, ultimately resulting in the Health Minister receiving reports of a plague of arthritis and dementia in toddlers...)

  • Judge Mentok the Mindtaker (unregistered) in reply to nobody

    Not only that -- what about 'functional' bugs? Not actually system errors, just unintended use.

    We have totally had clients come back and be like "What about this feature"?

    I wish that it weren't so.

  • RogerWilco (unregistered)

    Hmmm, 1857 sounds familliar. Maybe they are using Modified Julian day or something related to it?

    From Wikipedia:

    * The Modified Julian Day (MJD) is the number of days (with decimal fraction of the day) that have elapsed since midnight at the beginning of Wednesday November 17, 1858. In terms of the Julian day:

    MJD = JD − 2,400,000.5

Currently the value is 2454339.23542 − 2400000.5 = 54338.73542.
The day is found by rounding downward, currently giving 54338. This number changes at midnight UT or TT. It is 2,400,001 less than the Julian day number of the afternoon half of the same day (which is the same as the JD at noon). It is a multiple of 7 on Wednesdays.

The MJD was introduced by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1957 to record the orbit of Sputnik via an IBM 704 (36-bit machine) and using only 18 bits until 2576-08-07. MJD is the epoch of OpenVMS, using 63-bit date/time postponing the next Y2K campaign to 31-JUL-31086 02:48:05.47.
  • Arioch (unregistered)

    Same way i'm quite impressed by the list of software titles, which are updates by one of Microsoft recent patches: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929123/en-us#appliesto

    Captcha - pinball, yes, it was great WinNT4 game, greately missed in Win98...

  • psiphiorg (unregistered) in reply to poochner
    poochner:
    Nit: If the form is going to have separate fields for the NNN-MM-OOOO parts of a SSN (or similar), don't make me have to click or tab over to the next one. Especially don't require clicking because you've created some sort of random tab ordering. And for God's sake, allow spaces and dashes in CC numbers when they're being entered!
    I have exactly the opposite opinion. If the form has separate fields for the three parts of a social security number, don't automatically tab for me, then instead of getting 123-45-6789, my form is going to end up being 123-(blank)-45. I always hit tab to go to the next form element, and when the form thinks that it's smarter than I am, I have to go back and correct its misconception.

    One way that I would be okay with is if the first box tabbed over to the second only if you tried to enter a fourth number. So you type "123", the first box says "123", and the focus is still there. If you press tab, the focus goes to the second box and you start typing there. On the other hand, if you type "4" when you're still in the first box, then the focus shifts to the second box and your "4" is entered there.

    Still, I'd just prefer one box where I can type the whole thing the way it's actually formatted, "123-45-6789".

    davidh

  • Whoo... (unregistered) in reply to Jakester
    jakester:
    As someone who writes healthcare software for a living, I can tell you that going back 150 years isn't completely without merit. It is not uncommon to import or input historical data particularly with registries that look at longitudinal data. I know that one of the systems I worked on had to allow date of birth back to 1870, so this doesn't seem too out of line.

    I vote for healthcare too. An app I've been involved in allowed births from 1.1.1000 to 12.31.2300.

  • Err... (unregistered) in reply to misguided
    misguided:
    The REAL WTF is trying to burn a disc with Vista's unbelievable joke of a burning "feature" that makes no damn sense. When my newest laptop came with Vista on it, I was seriously SHOCKED to see that they hadn't improved it and it still does the stupid crap it did on XP:

    • You have the files you want to burn on your hard drive

    • To burn them, they need to be copied to the temporary directory that represents your burner. You now have a second copy of the files on your hard drive for no reason.

    • When you click burn, Windows then uses those temporary files to create a disc image before it burns them. You now have a THIRD copy on your hard drive for no reason.

    That's right folks, to burn an 8 GiB DVD, you need an extra 16 GiB of buffer space just because Windows is psychotic. So God help you if you don't have any third-party burning software, you can't find an open-source solution that works well for you on Vista, and you needed to burn things to disc because your hard drive is full! you are pretty much fucked, because "built-in" means "shitty and useless in the hopes that you go out and buy a Roxio product"

    Windoze CD burning "feature" IS a Roxio product, of sorts. 'Course, they probably want you to buy the full version.

  • Paolo G (unregistered) in reply to rsynnott
    rsynnott:
    The oldest properly validated person ever was 122 at death, but there have been people whose papers claimed that they were older than that. I don't think it's THAT silly to have it like it is.

    Now THAT'S what I'd call a silver surfer (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/silver_surfer).

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