WHAT THE BLOODY HELL?

One page wasn't working, and you browsed away from the page that wasn't working by clicking on the log-in link.

What's the hubub all about?

It's an important distinction to make, IMO. You simply cannot expect the same level of customer service from a free service that you would expect if you were paying for the service.


There are certainly those in the industry who behave this way, but I haven't noticed Robert behave that way, and I certainly strive to avoid that mindset myself.

What I have learned, after 20+ years of helping folks troubleshoot computer problems, is that the user's perception is only part of the story.


Do you provide your expertise to all comers for free? Of course not.

All I can say here is, "you get what you pay for." I'm really not understanding this sense of entitlement you have.


I usually operate from this definition:

a·nom·a·ly (-nm-l)
n. pl. a·nom·a·lies
1. Deviation or departure from the normal or common order, form, or rule.



Yes, I understand that. My point is that you managed to solve the issue, and that detailed troubleshooting is probably not warranted unless it affects more users, or unless it affects you more than once. (Robert may disagree, of course; it's his site, not mine.)


Yup.

Never before have I read something that truly made me rethink my life thus far. The wisdom and personal insight have awakened the spirit I knew was inside me, but not allowed to surface due to having no login problems.

That is starting to change greatly due to this easy to read yet meaningfully selfless philosophy. Thank you!

Never before have I been so moved, or engaged, by a post. I came out of a trance feeling rage and guilt. It points to a failure, and demands a contrite response

Please accept my sincere heartfelt condolences. I can relate to what it is to confront such a nightmare and empathize with what you must be going through and my thoughts are with both of you.

However, you have zero basis for inferring that those of us who get a kick out of A2K are Marxist/feminist/postmodernists. Also, you're mistaken to claim that A2K didn't have these sorts of complaints before Obama won the election.

I've been doing this throughout the decade, and it's been like this the whole time. It might be getting worse, though, and I suspect that's largely due to enablers who encourage members to have the sense of entitlement that makes these complaints seem legitimate.

I am extremely sorry for the harsh comments and I can not even think of the magnitude of the sorrow you are now going through, but I was unable to hold my emotions!

Watch it, riddle-boy. I'll invert your display, and you won't know if your coming or going.

Yasher koach DrewDad.

Who's coming? Who's going? Who's changing places?

A Mathematician, a Biologist and a Physicist are sitting in a street cafe watching people going in and coming out of the house on the other side of the street. First they see two people going into the house. Time passes. After a while they notice three persons coming out of the house.

The Physicist: "The measurement wasn't accurate."

The Biologist: "They have reproduced."

The Mathematician: "If now exactly one person enters the house then it will be empty again."

QED

Yes, that's correct.

I've been in a similar ball of wax as Set, and saw nothing wrong with my efforts - though not on a2k.

Looking at my own behavior, I think I may have misjudged something - instead of just clicking ahead, I fixated on whatever was on the screen. Or, as several people tried to tell me, I'd failed to clear cookies. And maybe I did, back then, though I thought I did clear them - maybe it wasn't at the right time.

But, what I see here is the prince of araby being a snot shifter.

Craven has said you may have uncovered some unclarity in instructions, Set.

You, on the other hand, are being bluster god... when I think what was happening with my own circumstance and presupposing to yours, how dare I, is a kind of panic, and, perhaps of unclarity in instruction.

So, in the meantime, I'll say, so what that the weird whatever you call them 'catcha' letters change, some being much weirder than others? They do change just as fast on lots of websites in similar circumstances. They change routinely, and you have already posted. That's the way they work.

Fascinating to read.

The only thing I can tell you is that it's not the puter.

Not that that tells any of us anything.

Oh well.

More! MORE! Bravo!.

That is not what happened. Either you still haven't read what i wrote, or you failed to understand it, which is hardly my problem.

The examples to which i referred were examples in which we had paid for a service. This has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement, it has to do with the persistence of a mind-set among engineers and code writers that they could not possibly be wrong, therefore trouble-shooting consists in finding out what the end-user has done wrong.

You're a snide so-and-so, but i learned that long ago.

Only one person here thinks he can't possibly be wrong.

I'll grant you, set, room for being right. But, chances aren't good.

Have you tried to check into the Sartorialist lately?

No one here ever paid for a service.
What are you on about, Set?

Setanta,

I'd said what I had to say about this, but it seems like you were waiting for more so I'll try to better explain. I have no interest in trying to convince you that you are wrong, or that I am right but will give the technical explanation as best as I can. I'd like to be able to disagree with your claims without the charge that I am the engineer type who thinks the "customer is always wrong".

I don't operate that way, and if there's a problem in the code I'll always want to fix it. That being said, if no such problem can be identified then there's nothing I can do, and I don't want to make the rest of it about defending the positions. So here's what I know:

1) Your description gave me two things I can use to improve. The first is to make a better message when you request a password reset to avoid multiple instances of doing so, the second is a much bigger one, and involves reusing the confirmation keys that are sent by email so that if you do submit the form over and over the link you click in the emails will all work instead of the current way where only the last one does.

Those are the things I can find in this process to do better. But the rest is, in my opinion, an error in interpretation.

2) There is no way the code we have for logging in can produce the anomaly you reported about using correct input 5 times and being told it was not correct. What you describe is, of course, theoretically still possible. For example you could have had your traffic rerouted to another site that looks just like ours while trying to steal your password, or a hacker could have replaced the code we have while you were doing it.

But what I do know is that what you described is not a possible outcome of the log in code we have. It's just not complex enough to have a transitive bug like that which can't be replicated.

I know such transitive bugs with difficulty in replication can exist, but they need more complexity than the few lines of code that handle logging in on our system.

So whatever it was, it's not something I can fix, as it's not a possible outcome of our code. I can give technical explanations of why, if it's helpful but I don't see much profit in doing so just to prove a point. I'd be happy to say I may well be wrong and the bottom line is that despite my best efforts there's no identifiable thing I can do about this right now.

I know you might not like it, and you may start portraying me as the willfully ignorant tech guy again but the bottom line is that I don't think any of the possible explanations I gave are at play either and I really don't believe a true anomaly occurred as you describe it. I have very convincing reasons to believe this, but my goal isn't to try to convince you or others of my opinion, it's just to say that with my best efforts I am led very strongly to a different conclusion.

3) There is no possible way that our code can do what you described on the password reset page either (specifically the part about the input disappearing without the page reloading). This is just plain simple fact. For any change to be done without page reloading by our code we would have to use a client side programming language (javascript) to do so and on that page there is no javascript code that can come close to doing this.

What's far more likely is that the page loaded so quickly that the refreshing was not detectable, but if you don't agree that's fine. I can still get improvements out of this part and decrease the likelihood of confusion there.

I know you say the page changed without loading, but without using a fundamentally different technology than what that page runs on this is not possible. What I find more likely is that our messages were not clear enough or prominent enough to more clearly communicate what was happening. The captcha code can be mistaken for the code you get when you fill out the form with the captcha, and the message only says that an email was sent to you.

If the message were more prominent, and the page no longer had the previous form at all or something like that, it would be much clearer that the next step is to check your email for the link.

So while I'm virtually certain that what you describe did not happen, I can see ways that the feature lends itself to more easily be interpreted to have happened that way, and that's a usability deficiency that I can act on.

Furthermore, while that may reduce the confusion that might generate multiple submits to the form, the next part is just plain horrid usability, where we delete your previous keys every time you make the request.

The idea was security, those are doors into your account so we want to clean them up and not leave them lying around, but the way we are doing them will be very confusing with multiple requests. So we can act on this as well and the new spec is for it to look up previous keys and reuse them while updating the date to keep it from being removed by the garbagehandler script.

This is a big improvement to usability we can make as well.

But that's really all I can draw from this description, as it is given. I am not under the illusion that I can't be wrong about my interpretation of the events but I think it's fair to say that no matter what my opinion there is no action items available anyway. I'd need to be able to replicate the bug to solve it.

And yeah, that opens me up to a bunch of the whole user versus tech guy wars again, so I might as well start it myself with this joke:

A physicist, an engineer and a programmer were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed. The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt.

The physicist said "We need to model the friction in the brake pads and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they failed".

The engineer said "I think I've got a few spanners in the back. I'll take a look and see if I can work out what's wrong".

The programmer said "Why don't we get going again and see if it's reproducable?"


Now that's a bit of an exaggeration, and in reality the programmer uses all three approaches. But it does underscore the fundamental need to be able to replicate the bug to fix it.

In technology, as in life, you don't always need to replicate a bug to fix it. But if it's absolutely impossible to replicate it, then it's also absolutely impossible to fix it. So I've looked, I can't see anything that can possibly cause that problem (and there are no errors in the error log about it at all), I've theorized and not been able to even think of a realistic theory. So whatever the case may be, if it can't be replicated I can't do much more. You can take shots at my competency and technical skill if you want, but I think it's unfair to take shots at my willingness to solve problems and the effort I'm willing to put into it. I can't verify portions of the report despite my willingness to try and not because of a deficiency of it.

You wrote this on the first post:



You are absolutely right about it not being my problem. Have a nice day.

So, you're transferring your frustration with those services onto Robert? Onto me? You seem to be the one with a stereotype in his head.


That's kinda like Foxfyre calling someone stubborn....

I am no more transferring frustrations than i was exercising a "sense of entitlement." I was making an observation about the pervasive culture of "the end user is always wrong" among engineers and code writers.

You can continue to make snide remarks attempting to slur me with your self-serving constructions of the meaning of what i have written--it is immaterial to me.

Craven replied to me, and i thanked him for that. I'll not waste my time further with you, since i am neither the author of your sour attitude toward the world, nor will i let it upset me.

i hijacked oyur account. mee soweez.

No, you're making an observation about your perception. I'm in the industry, and believe me when I say that people with that attitude don't last long.

That sounds a bit too petulant to me. Are you taking the piss? It could easily be an indignant heroine of a romance story speaking forcefully to a man who she felt had sought to take advantage of her too cheaply.

Most complaints are rooted in the shame of the thought of having been taken advantage of too cheaply. Instead of caveat emptor we now have rights. But I don't think that engineer types have forgotten the former all that much.