It must be my lucky day. I wanted to buy a great piece of software called “Remote Buddy” which lets me use my Wiimotes as a remote control for my Mac when it’s plugged into the tv to play movies, it’s very handy for lazy internet browsing, you can find the software here:
http://www.iospirit.com/products/remotebuddy
It’s fantastic and well worth the 20 euros is costs to buy, you can configure all sorts of functionalities.
Anyway, I couldn’t buy it because MasterCard, before buying something, requires you to enter a password setup with your bank that authenticates you are who you say you are, which is a great idea, except the programmers they hired to write the website, obviously were descended from monkeys. Which might be seen as a insult to our monkey friends.
The reason is quite simple, at my online banking, I can access the system and set the password, so I went there and entered my super secret password. So I entered it, went back to the website, tried to purchase, it didnt work. So obviously, the first thing you think is that you made a typo, retry, nope, doesn’t work.
ok, sssooooo, ok, maybe the typo was whilst setting the password at the online banking site. So I go back and make 100% sure what I typed was what I wanted to type (cause entering a password into a site where you can only see ***** is a fantastic usability feature!!!, especially when SETTING a password, it’s ok for when you are entering it, but when I am setting it, perhaps the “show password” button is a good idea. I go back to the website to buy again.
FAILED.
WTF WTF WTF????? Then I think, hmmmm, my password is almost 30 characters long, it’s not a password, it’s a passPHRASE, which is far easier to remember and far more secure. I get all programmery and decide to open the website HTML and look.
<input type="password" name="Pwd" maxlength="20" />
Words fail me. I go back to the online banking site and look for the same. In the banking site, there is no limit on the length, but when you are typing back to authenticate, there is a limit. So lets get this straight, I can enter a 100 character password to SET my password, but I can only use 20 of those characters when I am authenticating myself.
So no wonder it doesnt match, right??
Words fail me, some programmers are fucking retarded.
#1 by chris on September 4, 2009 - 11:36 am
Quote
When it rains, it pours.
I had a similar problem on the infolancer website, if you don’t know it, it’s a website for freelancers to put up their profile and try to obtain freelance work (clever huh!). Trying to login, would fail me everytime, I thought to myself, oh noes, not AGAIN, I mean, it can’t POSSIBLY BE THAT BAD, RIGHT?????
Yeah, so perhaps infolancer need to hire someone from their books to fix their website. Even better, the contact us form is broken, so when you try to post a comment, it’ll fail. Sounds like EPIC FAIL, which is the grade I would give these guys for this level of effort. Perhaps it’s fixed now, this was written in sept’2009
Looking at the login form for infolancer, I found the same old, same old, maxlength=”14″ on the password field, going into firebug and doing the geek thing, removing this restriction by deleting the attribute. YAY!!! Now I can login again. The login form is here:
http://www.infolancer.net/login.jsp
Why do people do this?? Are they just using Point’n'Click tools or are they manually typing this into their editor?? It beggers belief.