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Admin
A website with the concept of 'pages'.... how skeuomorphic... how 2007. This is 2016, we should welcome the idea of infinite pages.
Admin
When people are being unreasonable in their usage, just fit your system to their expectations. That's how it works. Good job Amanda.
The only regret I have with this is that unreasonable people won't have their assumptions challenged.
Admin
I think that's what's called "paving the cowpaths".
Admin
Or you could've just added a "jump to page" mini form
Admin
Which being new to Stella would not have been used.
Admin
Why does the new logs now jump to 4022? Or did I miss something?
Admin
Well my guess is that the 4022 is the transaction ID for the edit and not a page id....
PS: And when will the login error be fixed ???
Admin
I think you're confusing page numbers and record IDs.
Admin
... and hanzo'd while selecting all the food
Admin
I like the fact, people are very happy with the most cumbersome usage patterns.
Computers. Very complicated machines.
Admin
Work Log: Customer Website Time spent: 2 days Reason for work: PEBKAC
Admin
Best anti-enhancement argument I ever had was: the user does not want the enhancement you provided so they no longer need to type in 13 long unwieldy and similar filenames 3 times each in order to run this program, and instead just need to type in the month and year, because then they won't be sitting in front of their computers typing all day, and it will make it look as though they aren't doing any work, and the boss will be on their back.
Admin
What about teaching them about CTRL+click and then afterwards closing the tab?... nah that would make things too complicated
Admin
What you should see is that she's still closing down her browser and restarting from Page 1 even though it's not necessary anymore since she got links to all the pages.
Admin
if saving gets you to a different page please use any different software.
Admin
Or even just Middle-click?
Admin
Or have a drop-down box like so many sites have? The hack for one customer is a WTF in itself.
Admin
That's not a bad idea. I can already imagine Stella dutifully typing "37" in the textbox, pressing Enter, waiting for the new page to load, typing "36" in the textbox, pressing Enter, waiting for the new page to load...
Admin
Users--aren't they just cute little beasts?
Admin
Why would it jump you to page 30 after editing, rather than return you to the record that was edited with the update?
That right there I think is the main flaw...
Sure, closing the browser is a bit weird (no tabs I guess?)... but not wanting to click back is kind of reasonable. I don't know how the system in the story is supposed to act, but I have found on many websites I've visited that clicking back after say submitting a comment/post, results in a double post, due to how they coded the submission process.
Sorry, I just don't see the "wtf" in this story... it seems to make fun of how "not technical" a "user" is... and YEAH, they're just regular users. You're supposed to be designing interfaces that are usable by general, non-technical, users.
Admin
The only thing on the Universe called InterWebs that is worse than white-on-white-on-white-on-rice is the concept of infinite pages. If I had to "infinitely" scroll through 19,000 employees to find the one I want using "2016" software I'd be compelled to replace it with QuickBooks2000. Clearly, QB would explode with that many employees, but it beats the pants (and, probably some other clothing items) off infinitely scrolling records in the dozens-, hundreds-, and in some cases thousands-of-thousands.
Infinite scroll is like sorting. If you have 10 items in a list, you can bubble sort and it's OK. If you have 1,000 items in a list, you can't bubble sort quickly enough to not piss people off so you need to use a different sorting algorithm. Likewise, if you have 3 or 4 "pages" of content, you can do infinite scroll. But if you have 37 pages (or, in the case of my employees, 380 pages at 50 pe page) you better find a more efficient and user friendly way to paginate.
Admin
I was thinking the same thing. I did a very small amount of math, and the best I can come up with is there are near 135 records per page (very odd number, methinks, but it works for my example) and there is an error with calculating which page a particular record is on.
After editing a record, to find your page number you should use int(recordNumber / recordsPerPage) rather than round(recordNumber / recordsPerPage). Since 4022 / 135 = 29.7925, rounding would put you on page 30. If this is what's going on and there actuall 135 records per page, then editing record 3982 would result in the software returning page 29.
TRWTF is Amanda didn't find anything wrong with Stella saying she edits page 29 and ends on page 30, so she built a custom paginator for a single customer that fixes a WTF she didn't even look for that would fix this for everyone.
Admin
That was a very nice thing to do. Didn't completely solve the "problem", but seems a vast improvement.
Admin
The reason it "Jumps" is because it's GOTO Page 1 => GOTO Page 29 => EDIT Record 4022 (... 4023... 4024)
I didn't catch it at first either.
Admin
Yeah... this is a real WTF: An admin that went above and beyond to help a user? Talk about a freak occurance
Admin
Nowhere does it state that all the records are still active... or not filtered in some sort of way... or starts at 0....
Admin
Why fix something for the masses when you can bodge it now for the few?
Admin
The ending is unrealistic, should've been something like this:
Admin
$Diety, this gave me flashbacks to when I worked @ the phone Co. Computer w/ dumb terminal program running is hooked to a printer and a modem ... yes a modem. Mainframe in another state runs a program and calls the modem. Terminal takes output and dumps it directly to the printer (2+ reams of paper per day w/ a person in charge of refilling the paper drawer on the printer). Another person takes the 800+ pages of print to their desk. Goes through it and finds 2 pages. Throws the rest away. Takes those pages and hand inputs 3 numbers into another program from their desk.
Modem breaks, nobody know the modem settings (Bits, Parity, etc.). Mainframe can only run the program once per day (no breaks and no test connections). It has to run to completion! Failure makes the next run longer since it tries to process the unprocessed data plus the new data.
I visited every time the run finished/failed and reset the modem to another setting ... it took ~5 months to find the right modem setting, since by the end of the time, it was taking 6-12 days to complete a run ... and fail!
Once got the setting right, it spewed paper for over a month and burned out 2 printers along the way.
All offers to replace this with a small script to find the numbers and forward them either to the end user or directly into the receiving program was met by cries of the world ending.
No wonder Dilbert is based on the phone companies.
Admin
$Diety, this gave me flashbacks to when I worked @ the phone Co. Computer w/ dumb terminal program running is hooked to a printer and a modem ... yes a modem. Mainframe in another state runs a program and calls the modem. Terminal takes output and dumps it directly to the printer (2+ reams of paper per day w/ a person in charge of refilling the paper drawer on the printer). Another person takes the 800+ pages of print to their desk. Goes through it and finds 2 pages. Throws the rest away. Takes those pages and hand inputs 3 numbers into another program from their desk.
Modem breaks, nobody know the modem settings (Bits, Parity, etc.). Mainframe can only run the program once per day (no breaks and no test connections). It has to run to completion! Failure makes the next run longer since it tries to process the unprocessed data plus the new data.
I visited every time the run finished/failed and reset the modem to another setting ... it took ~5 months to find the right modem setting, since by the end of the time, it was taking 6-12 days to complete a run ... and fail!
Once got the setting right, it spewed paper for over a month and burned out 2 printers along the way.
All offers to replace this with a small script to find the numbers and forward them either to the end user or directly into the receiving program was met by cries of the world ending.
No wonder Dilbert is based on the phone companies.
Admin
Oh please oh please oh please, You have to be kidding whimper...
What on earth were they thinking????!!!??? (Oh I know they weren’t thinking obviously), but still why burn so many work hours, not to mention huge amounts of paper for such a trivial task..
Couldn't they have hooked up a small computer to emulate the printer, dump the 'printout' to file and then find the data by inspecting the file at least..... (not to mention doing the finding using some sort of pattern match or similar)...
Admin
Sadly, I went through something very similar to $Science_gone_Bad; grind through huge job that prints out hundreds of pages to find a very small set of numbers, throw the paper away and use the numbers for something else.
I did automate it - for myself for debugging. What took them 6 hours/day took me a few seconds. For five YEARS, they knew I had it but refused to let me deploy it because there were required upgrades with contractual requirements that the process does not get any slower, and this was the holdback for insurance purposes. By the time I finally left, they hadn't deployed it.
Admin
Reminds me of her Aunt, "Gladys". Gladys had a laugh like a Porpoise having a giggle while on laughing gas. I once asked her to add two paragraphs on page 12 of a document, and she said, sure, but the will take two days. Why two days? Well, of course, that messes up the pagination and she will have to cut and paste text from file Doc_Page12 to Doc_Page13, ... all the way through file 44. That takes two days. Of course!
Admin
Perfect
Admin
And I still can't log in because something isn't a string or object.
I'm totally with Stella on this. I hate those 1 2 3 .... 298 299 300 things at the bottom of web pages. And even worse are the ones that say 1 2 3 4 5 6 and then when you click on six suddenly morph into 6 7 8 ... 298 299 300.
Promote her over all the people who page forward one at a time.
Also whats with the capcha? Select all the taxis and there's not a single black car in the pictures.
Admin
Admin
never underestimate the user. Once they figure something out, and it works, that's the way they'll do it. Because it works, because they know doing that way they won't screw something up. The average employee lives in fear of screwing something up. Much better to take 2 hours to do a 2-minute task, than to try to do it in just 2 minutes and screw it up. Taking longer to do something is (almost always) OK, but screwing up is a fireable offense.
After all, this person is NOT paid to learn a new system, or figure out how to do the job faster. They're paid to update the records.
Admin
I like visiting pages. Forwards, backwards, between keyboard and chair ... the more, the merrier.
Admin
Another possibility is that Stella is editing the last record on the page, and when she saves it, the system dutifully and automatically goes to the next record, which happens to be on the next page because it crosses a pagination break..
Admin
... that field being the page number which of course needs to be amended by hand as it's hardwired.
Admin
Stella may not have been a bot, but she comes pretty close to failing the Turing test.
Admin
So nobody wondering why she is editing the same pages over and over? Why is she updating? Web pages are not meant to work that way, she needs to be editing data on a back-end system, not frigging the front end.
Admin
No, it doesn't say any of those things. My bad for doing math in a way that might explain the acutal problem here.
Also my bad for thinking there's something wrong with paging through all these details to find the one you want. One can only presume pages 1..37 contain records of the same type, so I ask, WTF? No search box by record key or other meaningful information? Really, I mean WHAT THE FUCK??
Admin
I would consider this a possibility, but I got the feeling Stella was paging through to page 29, editing a record, and paging back to page 29 to edit the next record. If it were the last record on the page, flipping to the next page (a mere WTH compared to the WTFery here) would mean Stella could just click and edit the record she needs.
Classic case of what happens when people actually use your software to maintain millions of details about everything in their business, accounting, employee and/or customer base, manufacturing, etc. and you only tested it using 3 records. And oh, looky here..... We have another WTF, don't we??
Admin
Nobody will ever explain us what those last numbers mean, right? It's like an open ending or something?
Admin
They don't need explaining, cousteau. Those are part of the log file from after the fix that shows that Stella now starts at page 1, goes directly to page 29 rather than scroll through a bajilion of pages, then edits one record and starts anew, one by one, for every record.
Admin
reminds me of a time i tried to sort the pages in a report and they wound up in this order: 1,10,11...2,20,21...3,30,31...to fix it i had to change the first 9 page numbers to 01,02,03...