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
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