Minor things that bother you

[SSOWorld]

Web forms

PERIOD!

They are of such crap design and are often broken (I've often gotten an error for a field that was mandatory - but yet didn't exist on the page - as an example)

[kphoger]

Web forms

PERIOD!

They are of such crap design and are often broken (I've often gotten an error for a field that was mandatory - but yet didn't exist on the page - as an example)

Our application process at work has one question that's multiple choice.  Because of that, we can't make it a mandatory field and applicants are able to submit their application without it having been answered.  However, without it being answered, we cannot submit the application to the next step in the process, which then means they have to fill out a paper copy and fax it over to us.

[J N Winkler]

Web form problems could easily be a thread in their own right.  I especially love the forms where "You got this wrong!" appears right away--usually meaning client-side validation is in play--but don't say what exactly the problem is.  Every so often I feel tempted to use curl to do a postback with the noncompliant input and let the server blow up.

[Scott5114]

Either Firefox has code to finesse the issue, or I just haven't had the misfortune of trying to do business with a place that cares enough to check my system clock... but I wonder how that functions on Linux, where the hardware system clock is by custom set to UTC, and adjusted to local time only when it is to be displayed to the user. (This leads to various forms of weirdness in the rare case I need to run Windows software on Linux, like GRLevel3's auto-polling breaking because thinks the next Doppler data refresh will be 6 hours in the future.)

If you are curious, you can go to Popeyes' store locator, enter your city and state, and see if any of the locations are reported as closed.  I've done this just now for Norman, Oklahoma and the website says they are all closed, which is just not believable going into the dinner hour in this timezone.  (This is with Firefox 98 64-bit on Windows 10.)

It would appear Firefox is reporting local time, since the nearest Popeyes at I-240 and Sooner is showing as open. With a little bit of digging into the underlying architecture, my guess is that Firefox probably just uses the localtime(3) system call, which returns the system clock time translated into whatever time zone is set in the TZ environment variable. This would mean that the true system clock time is opaque to Popeyes.

(The reason for setting the system clock to UTC and using TZ/localtime(3) to translate, rather than simply setting the clock to local time, is to allow individual user accounts to specify their preferred timezone, since remote access to a user account through ssh is assumed to be a possibility. This can lead to silliness on Windows/Linux dual-boot systems if both OSes are set to automatically adjust the system clock to match an Internet time signal.)

Related: websites that have "hours of operation" and close at night, like the IRS website. Have their Web developers somehow never been on the Internet before?

This is strange.  I wonder if the hours-of-operation thing arises from the website being so buggy it cannot be allowed to serve remote clients without a sysadmin on hand to intervene manually when it falls over.

I have two guesses. One is that it may be a particularly ham-fisted attempt at queue management (i.e. it stems from a desire to not have a backlog of work submitted overnight to deal with at start of business). The other is that it's a misguided attempt at avoiding frustration due to work being lost from a user starting work outside of business hours, encountering a question they need to ask an IRS employee, and then finding the form has timed out between then and when an IRS employee is available.

Web form problems could easily be a thread in their own right.  I especially love the forms where "You got this wrong!" appears right away--usually meaning client-side validation is in play--but don't say what exactly the problem is.  Every so often I feel tempted to use curl to do a postback with the noncompliant input and let the server blow up.

Indeed they are. Fortunately, they've recently improved somewhat due to HTML 5 making some extended behavior that was commonly shimmed into them with (often poorly-implemented) JavaScript now part of their standard feature set.

Recently I've found that the Pizza Hut website has become wholly unusable for me. under Firefox, and noticeably broken but still usable under Chrome. I wonder what has happened and why it hasn't been fixed yesterday, as I can't imagine it does wonders for their bottom line–Domino's website works perfectly fine.

[StarlightRunner]

County Route numbering here in 'Jersey annoys me to no end. Not that I need them to navigate - We live in the era of smartphones and GPS, luckily. - but because it seems every other non-residential road you come across is a County Route. Especially when many are under a mile long, it largely desensitizes you to the shield, which is bad in a State where 500-series CR's are valid long-distance routes.

[kevinb1994]

County Route numbering here in 'Jersey annoys me to no end. Not that I need them to navigate - We live in the era of smartphones and GPS, luckily. - but because it seems every other non-residential road you come across is a County Route. Especially when many are under a mile long, it largely desensitizes you to the shield, which is bad in a State where 500-series CR's are valid long-distance routes.

I get that the state used to NOT sign each and every county route on the overhead for the traffic signals. They had stuck to their policy of signing the route at ground level. Of course, there were notable exceptions.

On the other hand, I recall when I was going to school in Cherry Hill that they completely screwed up the overhead for what is actually Coles Ave, but was somehow changed to Coles Mill Road before someone realized that whoever was in charge of sign replacement screwed up somehow.

[vdeane]

I was already considering switching browsers over the coming API changes that will break adblockers, but this might just be the final nail in the coffin.

Manifest version 3, you mean?  Google's pretense that this isn't a naked exercise of its economic power is even more threadbare than usual.  I'm just glad they aren't doing anything about ad-blocking HOSTS files.

Yes, that.  Supposedly AdBlock Plus is less affected than others like UBlock Origin, but I'm still concerned with how things like blocking YouTube ads will work once Manifest v2 goes away.

[Scott5114]

Personally, if the ads on YouTube get too much more intrusive when not blocked, I'm apt to stop using the platform altogether. 30 seconds worth of ads to watch a sub-10-minute video just isn't a good use of my time, and paying to get rid of them isn't a good use of my money.

Previously if an ad was too long, you could report it (I would always select the reason as "inappropriate" because I don't think advertising is ever appropriate) and once this was done it would jump you to the video, but now doing this merely shows a different ad.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

Personally, if the ads on YouTube get too much more intrusive when not blocked, I'm apt to stop using the platform altogether. 30 seconds worth of ads to watch a sub-10-minute video just isn't a good use of my time, and paying to get rid of them isn't a good use of my money.

Early in the COVID era YouTube instead of showing you one 15-second ad that was usually skippable started showing very short back-to-back and usually non-skippable ads that add up to about 15 seconds instead. I found this far more annoying than the previous format.

[MATraveler128]

Ads for YouTube these days are worse than before as a 15 second ad that you can't skip will play and there will be another ad after sometimes also 15 seconds unskippable. It's always annoying to see "Ad 1 of 2 0:15"  with no skip button. Even worse, they sometimes play 5 second ads on 15 second meme videos regardless of how many subscribers that channel has.

[kkt]

And then more ads that appear covering the picture while it plays.  fuckem.  I now only open the few youtube links that seem really really compelling.  No description, no open.

[Big John]

^^ any links without a description.

[hbelkins]

Another language-related gripe: Use of "publically" instead of "publicly." I'm not sure that "publically" is actually a word.

Also, "noone" for "no one."

[US 89]

Typing "were" into a phone and having it autocorrect to "we're" pisses me off to no end. Most of the time I start a sentence with those four letters, it's going to become a question of some sort (i.e. "Were you going to...").

[kphoger]

Typing "were" into a phone and having it autocorrect to "we're" pisses me off to no end. Most of the time I start a sentence with those four letters, it's going to become a question of some sort (i.e. "Were you going to...").

I have a dumbphone, so I use predicative T9 for text messages.  For some reason, it refuses to believe that anyone would ever want to start a text message with the word "In".  Drives me nuts.

[roadman65]

Dozens of phony happenings in threads here on April Fools Day.

[kphoger]

People who expect me to wear green on St Patrick's Day.

[MATraveler128]

Dozens of phony happenings in threads here on April Fools Day.

Yeah, I know it's April Fools Day, but those types of threads get tiring after a while.

[kphoger]

My opinion:  They need to be of excellent quality.  The title should be halfway believable, enough so that you get two or three sentences in before you're totally convinced it's a spoof.

[kkt]

Autocorrect is a demon from hell.

I'm perfectly capable of making my own mistakes, I don't need autocorrect adding to them.

[hotdogPi]

Autocorrect is a demon from he'll.

FTFY

[kkt]

Autocorrect is a demon from he'll.

FTFY

[Mapmikey]

Dozens of phony happenings in threads here on April Fools Day.

Yeah, I know it's April Fools Day, but those types of threads get tiring after a while.

What would be more fun is to present something ridiculous on April 1 that is actually true.

An example would be the proposal to extend US 70 to Hawaii. However, it was October when I found that and didn't want to wait 6 months to share it.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

Yeah, I thought usually it was just the annual CNGL-Leudimin thread and maybe one other thing, if I knew there would be like 20 threads today I would have skipped.

[webny99]

Dozens of phony happenings in threads here on April Fools Day.

Not sure if this was intentional based on the previous posts before yours, but if so, well done.