[opensuse] novell web site broke as heck
So, I go to log in to the novell web site to order the latest retail boxed dvd, as I have done since at least 9.1 But I get presented with some new form that demands I fill in some "required" profile info (that they have been living without all these years up to now somehow...) before allowing me to proceed. So, web forms and marketing databasing and registration annoy the hell out of me and I absolutely hate crap like this, but it's universal so I fill it in anyways even though I _hate_ doing so. I'm feeling so magnanimous that I even fill in the phone number field even though it was not marked as a required field. The submit fails and the redrawn form says more info required and the phone number field is empy. So apparently it wants a phone number despite being marked as optional, and although I had actually filled in a phone number, apparently it didn't like the format I had used with no dashes, spaces, or perens. Well now I'm annoyed and perversely don't want to fill in the phone number field (even though my cmpanies main public phone number is of course no secret), and my initial tolerance for playing along and cooperating with these forms which I hate is now gone and I'm back to my real feling of hating the whole form, let alone any particula field. So I hit the feedback link on the page and submit a feedback about the form being broken. The _feedback_ form breaks! 500 internal server error OK maybe my long winded message with cut & paste copy of my filled-in form with error message was too long for the feedback form to accept (although there is no message size limit displayed on the page). So I try to submit a new fedback about _that_ with the difference being a very short and plain message with no ususual cut&paste's in the message body, just a short sentence. THAT fails! Awsome! Why didn't I think of that ingenius way to improve my own companies support statistics? Just make the support and feedback mechanisms broken and voila! Hardly any support calls or negative feedback! Pure genius! I wonder if this last ditch manual email to support@novell.com will bounce? I give up. I just buy the retail box sets just to be nice and because I appreciate the work that goes into the distribution. But I don't need them. I don't think I've ever actually used one of the retail dvd's to do an actual install. I always do net installs from my own mirror or else I had already downloaded an iso weeks or months before I received my nice box. They're just there to look pretty on my shelf. I'm sure I could still order the box without logging in under my usual profile, or I'm sure simply filling in that phone number with dashes or some other formatting will satisfy the form, but now I'm all annoyed and uncooperative. So if the site wants to annoy me out of buying stuff, that's really no skin off my nose. Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://profile.to/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 16:59 -0500, Brian K. White wrote:
So, I go to log in to the novell web site to order the latest retail boxed dvd, as I have done since at least 9.1
But I get presented with some new form that demands I fill in some "required" profile info (that they have been living without all these years up to now somehow...) before allowing me to proceed.
So, web forms and marketing databasing and registration annoy the hell out of me and I absolutely hate crap like this, but it's universal so I fill it in anyways even though I _hate_ doing so. I'm feeling so magnanimous that I even fill in the phone number field even though it was not marked as a required field.
The submit fails and the redrawn form says more info required and the phone number field is empy. So apparently it wants a phone number despite being marked as optional, and although I had actually filled in a phone number, apparently it didn't like the format I had used with no dashes, spaces, or perens.
Well now I'm annoyed and perversely don't want to fill in the phone number field (even though my cmpanies main public phone number is of course no secret), and my initial tolerance for playing along and cooperating with these forms which I hate is now gone and I'm back to my real feling of hating the whole form, let alone any particula field.
So I hit the feedback link on the page and submit a feedback about the form being broken.
The _feedback_ form breaks! 500 internal server error
OK maybe my long winded message with cut & paste copy of my filled-in form with error message was too long for the feedback form to accept (although there is no message size limit displayed on the page).
So I try to submit a new fedback about _that_ with the difference being a very short and plain message with no ususual cut&paste's in the message body, just a short sentence.
THAT fails!
Awsome! Why didn't I think of that ingenius way to improve my own companies support statistics? Just make the support and feedback mechanisms broken and voila! Hardly any support calls or negative feedback! Pure genius! I wonder if this last ditch manual email to support@novell.com will bounce?
I give up. I just buy the retail box sets just to be nice and because I appreciate the work that goes into the distribution. But I don't need them. I don't think I've ever actually used one of the retail dvd's to do an actual install. I always do net installs from my own mirror or else I had already downloaded an iso weeks or months before I received my nice box. They're just there to look pretty on my shelf. I'm sure I could still order the box without logging in under my usual profile, or I'm sure simply filling in that phone number with dashes or some other formatting will satisfy the form, but now I'm all annoyed and uncooperative. So if the site wants to annoy me out of buying stuff, that's really no skin off my nose.
Frustration is understandable, and I'm sorry the Novell site is broken. The login w/ a Novell Account thing is slightly annoying, after all they're getting some info about you when you buy the product in the first place, but as you siad, it's pretty much universal. You'd have to do the same for an openSUSE Account. As far as the technical problems go, that is a real issue and hopefully someone from Novell's web team can get on that. Thanks for buying the openSUSE boxed edition (or at least attempting to ;-)) and hopefully these problems will get repaired. -- Kevin "Yeaux" Dupuy - openSUSE Member Public Mail: <kevin.dupuy@opensuse.org> Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays from the Yeaux! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Frustration is understandable,
I appreciate the sympathetic ear. And it turns out the feedback forms actually did deliver my message both times, since I received an appropriate email reply from both submits. Merely the site displayed an error to me saying it failed. So the error happened at some point after actually accepting, filing, and delivering the form data. And of course despite being aggrevated I went back and filled in the silly phone number field with a reasable guess at the formatting it wants, which worked, and orderd the dvd. It's just that life seems to be full of these kinds of annoyances and what makes them really, well, annoying is that there isn't one but many, and that they are all unnecessary and artificially generated out of nothing. Having a problem while doing something you want to do or at least agree to the necessity of doing, that's one thing. That can be seen as simply part of the price or cost of reaching whatever goal you're about at the time. My back and hands hurt and I have a splinter because shovels aren't perfect, but I wanted that hole dug and now it's dug. Having a problem doing something you don't even want to be doing and whos necessity you don't agree with at all, but are simply being forced by someone bigger to do it, that's a whole different level of anger fodder. Veering off topic, bugs in license managers that disable expensive and paid-for software are my other even more favorite artificially injected problem. There's not enough actual technical problems, we need to create more via drm and license managers... Maybe in the case of the anoyance of web registration, maybe there is a possible technical answer. I do see why each individual site wants it's users to be registered rather than anonymous. The problem is merely that it's mind killing redundant and annoying to have to fill in the forms every time you encounter a post somewhere and just want to fire off your bit of relevant experience you may have had that would answer the guys question. So what about a central registration database? Have a site whose only job is to hold a copy of all the info that you might ever enter about yourself into the profile/registration forms of all the zillions of sites out there you ever want to use. Then, convince most sites to support some kind of api with this registration db site. Then when you visit a site, your browser can automatically supply any registration type info the site wants, and the user just has to maybe click an Allow/Deny/Modify prompt once per site the first time they visit a new site. You would have to tell the browser that you are user NNNN of the db site somehow, but once you did that the bowser could then tell that to every new site and the sites could fetch what they want from the db site. Perhaps the way you could tell the browser that you are user nnnn is by having a few big widely used sites like google and facebook have that as part of their home or login pages, so, when you log in to facebook from any random pc, it sets a cookie which then supplies your universal user id to other sites for the duration of that session. Or failing that you could just log in to the db site but that's an extra step, wheras you might very often log into google desktop or facebook or somthing naturally anyways no matter what strange pc you happen to sit down at. hm... -- Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://profile.to/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Brian K. White wrote:
So, I go to log in to the novell web site to order the latest retail boxed dvd, as I have done since at least 9.1
But I get presented with some new form that demands I fill in some "required" profile info (that they have been living without all these years up to now somehow...) before allowing me to proceed.
So, web forms and marketing databasing and registration annoy the hell out of me and I absolutely hate crap like this, but it's universal so I fill it in anyways even though I _hate_ doing so. I'm feeling so magnanimous that I even fill in the phone number field even though it was not marked as a required field.
The submit fails and the redrawn form says more info required and the phone number field is empy. So apparently it wants a phone number despite being marked as optional, and although I had actually filled in a phone number, apparently it didn't like the format I had used with no dashes, spaces, or perens.
Well now I'm annoyed and perversely don't want to fill in the phone number field (even though my cmpanies main public phone number is of course no secret), and my initial tolerance for playing along and cooperating with these forms which I hate is now gone and I'm back to my real feling of hating the whole form, let alone any particula field.
So I hit the feedback link on the page and submit a feedback about the form being broken.
The _feedback_ form breaks! 500 internal server error
OK maybe my long winded message with cut & paste copy of my filled-in form with error message was too long for the feedback form to accept (although there is no message size limit displayed on the page).
So I try to submit a new fedback about _that_ with the difference being a very short and plain message with no ususual cut&paste's in the message body, just a short sentence.
THAT fails!
Awsome! Why didn't I think of that ingenius way to improve my own companies support statistics? Just make the support and feedback mechanisms broken and voila! Hardly any support calls or negative feedback! Pure genius! I wonder if this last ditch manual email to support@novell.com will bounce?
It's a defensive mechanism put in place after kde4 was unleashed on the public. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2009-01-28 at 16:59 -0500, Brian K. White wrote:
The _feedback_ form breaks! 500 internal server error ... I give up.
Write a bugzilla, and tell them you are not buying till they solve it >;-) - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkmBCDgACgkQtTMYHG2NR9WSQwCfcKqPdp5JI7AOE+CLBywnwvLV Vk4AoJXsPneC++Wg+bR43kvcy1y1TzHc =nYOm -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
participants (4)
-
Brian K. White -
Carlos E. R. -
David C. Rankin -
Kevin Dupuy