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Admin
I had that same error on the Dilbert site yesterday - Feb 17th.
Admin
The first one is a misinterpretation of the date on which the notification was posted...
Admin
Ye, the Dilbert one has been going on for a while now.
Admin
You mean the second one?
The first one is surely a job seeker's ad: they need QA personel ASAP.
"Mumble mumble something international date line iwishalltimestampsincludedthebloodytimezone"
Also, please stop with the "this winter!" thing, it's gonna be summer for the other half of the world.
Admin
That New York DMV site isn't asking you to put in a phone number into the email address. TRWTF is that it has a separate phone number field with the CSS style
display: none. It's required, but it's invisible!Admin
Requiring entry of passwords in a specific format XXX-XXX-XXXX is a particular hatred of mine. Parsing a phone number is child's play, the fact that you can tell it's in the wrong format is the same amount of work as just handling it for you. Bonus terrible if you live outside the US. Hiding the field but not turning off the validation is double-bonus-plus-good.
Admin
The "advertisement" that I submitted was an image of a clearly marked advertisement that in turn was just obfuscated Javascript. It looks like I'm going to have to submit today's "Error'd" to Error'd. How meta is that?
Admin
I can confirm that the first item is an ad, because it didn't show up until I disabled my ad blocker.
Admin
Good grief! You're right. I submitted it as an image.It never dawned on me that my ad blocker would actually analyze an image that I created by screen capture.
Admin
Indeed. That will teach me to look more carefully before I post. But I think I'm right about it being a reference to when the announcement/headline was posted.
Admin
It's probably blocking based on just the file name alone. And yes, that sounds like a rather stupid blocking rule.
Admin
Yes. I often see web forms that say "enter credit card number with no spaces". Why? It would take one line of code in most languages to remove the spaces, surely less code than that required to check for spaces and format and display an error message. RE phone numbers: I worked on a web site where another programmer had put in code to give an error message if the phone number contained any non-digits, hyphens or parentheses or whatever. I changed it to just strip out the non-digits. It was four lines of code.
Admin
I also saw the JavaScript ad, it was on SMBC 3-4 days ago, not Dilbert. I was going to submit it myself, but I made the mistake of refreshing before I grabbed a screenshot.
Addendum 2022-02-18 15:46: Oops, I misunderstood the earlier reference to Dilbert, because I hadn't gotten that far yet.
Admin
I read the first one as "Aratere (the name of the ferry) sailing on 10 Feb had COVID" and thought "how does a ferry get Covid?".
Admin
If you post a date on the internet and it's not UTC, then you are doing it wrong. As plain an simple. In fact if you don't use consistently UTC in your application, you are simply doing it wrong. There is no way to sugar coat this. You can add options to allow the front end conversions, but those should always be an user selected option, because even the location where the user is using the front end from is no indication which time zones is required.
Admin
Depends what you mean by "post a date". If you mean "store a date inside the application", then yes, you're right. If you mean "show a date to an end-user", then no, UTC is not unconditionally the right answer.
Example: your application is for users in France. It's probably best to show dates and times as CET/CEST because that's the time zone in France. (And show them in CET or CEST according to the date when the thing is, not the date today.
Example: your application is for users in the US. Show dates and times as one of the US time zones, clearly labelled as to which one it is. Avoid Arizona time and Hawaii time (unless the thing is about something in one of those states) because they don't use Daylight Savings.
Example: your application is for registered users from the whole world. Ask them for their time zone, and use that.
And regardless of what you do, label the date/time with the time zone you display it in.
Admin
A 'favourite' of mine is a site that asks for your phone number, with something like "e.g. 123 456 7890" next to it. If you enter your number in that format and click Submit, it gives a "please enter your phone number without spaces" error.
Admin
The Interislander banner actually referenced two separate notice titles, joined with "&". The result was misleading, especially so because the first one ended with a date, and the second started with a date. So not a time zone issue this time.
Admin
The banking system in Australia uses a BSB (Bank State Branch) number to identify which institution/location a particular bank account belongs to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_state_branch#Format It's a six digit number often presented as xxx-xxx, however it's commonly used without the dash.
My former employer's payroll system (Peoplesoft) would happily accept a six-digit number without a dash, tell me that the BSB didn't exist in the system and prompt me to submit a form to get the BSB recognised in the system, rather than just insert the damn dash.
Admin
Compare the first date listed against the system date at the top right of the image.
Admin
It is hardly surprising that a website directed at solely at New Zealanders in New Zealand displays dates & times in NZ local time.
It is hardly surprising that a user in Europe or the Americas has their phone set to their local time.
It is hardly surprising that NZ timestamps from their past few hours appear to be in the future when viewed across the international date line. That effect exists 24/7/365 and has for at least a century since the IDL was more or less standardized.
It is only surprising to me that people in IT find this surprising.
Admin
No, it does make sense. If you click "Find out more", it will tell you two things. The first being something about tomorrow's interislander sailings (presumably some changes or cancellations). The second being about the Covid case on the 3pm 10 February service. Two separate notices, one about tomorrow, one about something a few days ago. The fact that the first one isn't a complete sentence means that it sounds like one notice about an event on two different dates.
Admin
Oh interesting. So if it hadn't been the case that the "3:00pm Aratere sailing on 10 Feb had COVID positive person on board", then there would be a service alert with the text "Interislander sailings Tuesday 15th Feb"?
Admin
Correct.