Examples of brain dead software design

Forums › Off topic › Examples of brain dead software design

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | ... | 29

2043 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Lifetime subscriber

#3247085 10-Jun-2024 20:44

richms:
Websites that insist on a mobile number and when I autofill it with +6421xxxxxx they tell me its not valid, so I have to change it to 021xxxxxx and it still tells me its not valid, so then I am like WT actual F? and have to stick another digit on the end because they have a minimum length as well as rejecting a correctly formatted number.

Ha funny. I added a recovery mobile number to a Google Workspace user account today and it presented a little NZ flag for the Country Code, so I figured okay it wants it in +6427xxxxxxx format and entered it beginning with 27xxxxxxx and no leading zero.
However, once I got the acknowledgment email, it said the number had been updated to 027xxxxxxx with a leading zero and no country code. I guess it's just clever than me...

jamesrt

1612 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3247218 11-Jun-2024 08:44

allan:
richms:

Websites that insist on a mobile number and when I autofill it with +6421xxxxxx they tell me its not valid, so I have to change it to 021xxxxxx and it still tells me its not valid, so then I am like WT actual F? and have to stick another digit on the end because they have a minimum length as well as rejecting a correctly formatted number.

Ha funny. I added a recovery mobile number to a Google Workspace user account today and it presented a little NZ flag for the Country Code, so I figured okay it wants it in +6427xxxxxxx format and entered it beginning with 27xxxxxxx and no leading zero.
However, once I got the acknowledgment email, it said the number had been updated to 027xxxxxxx with a leading zero and no country code. I guess it's just clever than me...

I suspect it's built for the large amount of people who aren't technical and don't realize the leading 0 isn't actually part of the phone number; especially when adding the country-code - the number of times I've seen +6402..... on people's contact details in emails / websites / etc is actually rather depressing.

pdh

343 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3247486 11-Jun-2024 15:11

> the number of times I've seen +6402..... on people's contact details in emails / websites / etc is actually rather depressing.

I know that it's deplorable that the world's geek quotient is low, but on the other hand...
Let's try and be geeky for the fun of it - only when it doesn't drive the wider population nuts ;-)

Can anyone give a logical reason that our mobile numbers are unique in having an on-again / off-again leading zero ?

I know it's not true in the Can/USA, and I think it's not in the UK and S Africa. Can't remember for Australia.

But my old NZ landlines stayed the same for national / international usage (ie: 9-479-xxxx or 64-9-479-xxxx).

So, that would've been an intuitive model to have followed, when mobile numbers were introduced here in the '80s (??)
(I got my enormous Motorola brick-phone in Feb '92.)

But for some techo reason (that undoubtedly held water at the time) we got un-intuitive, disappearing, leading zeros.
And decades of non-geeks have suffered...
What would have been so terrible in just making it 64-021 ?

richms

28180 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3247488 11-Jun-2024 15:15

The US had major problems when they widened the range of areacodes and prefixes as prior to that the second digit told you if it was an areacode or not (areas all had 0 or 1 in the second place, and exchange prefixes did not) - this was hard wired into the design of old switches which is why it took them till the 90's to be able to get around this and people started to have to dial 10 digits for local calls etc, but put a 1 infront if it was outside their free calling and other absurdities.

Richard rich.ms

evnafets

537 posts

Ultimate Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#3247492 11-Jun-2024 15:28

pdh:

Can anyone give a logical reason that our mobile numbers are unique in having an on-again / off-again leading zero ?

But my old NZ landlines stayed the same for national / international usage (ie: 9-479-xxxx or 64-9-479-xxxx).
What would have been so terrible in just making it 64-021 ?

To do with the way the telephone exchanges were set up. Possibly does not apply today, but would be hard to change.

It is completely consistent though.
From a plain old telephone:

If the number was on a local exchange, you just dialled the number without a prefix.
To call a different telephone exchange in NZ you dialled '0' then the region prefix you want. i.e. 09 for Auckland.
If calling international, dial '00'. (represented as + on mobiles), then country code, then region. e.g. 00 64 9 if calling Auckland from overseas.

Mobile phones are not part of local exchange from a regular landline - so you needed to dial '0'. Each telco was originally its own 'region'
Hence 021 vs 025 numbers that were not originally portable between the networks.

So it is perfectly consistent.
From within NZ you can call 021....
From outside NZ you call +6421... - where the '+' is that countries 'escape sequence' for making an international call. Generally 00?

pdh

343 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3247498 11-Jun-2024 15:57

Richard - that's interesting, when abouts did those US problems happen ?
I should read up on historic telephone numbering protocols.
It must be strewn with earnest committees and many 'what-we-should've-dones'.

In my life I've gone from 3 digits (rural Canada, party-line - early '50's), up to 4 within our village, then the pita blow when we had to add a 3-digit preamble to make 7 digits (my teen years). I came to NZ in '82 (Auckland N shore - so my landlines here were already of the 7-digit format), but I remember some rural NZ exchanges (ie: Gt Barrier) were still using fewer digits.

My old Canadian area code was 514 - which conforms to your middle-digit rule - but we never used '514' unless we used a preamble '1' to signify we were embarking on a long-distance call. Nobody ever dialled 514-xxx-xxxx, it was always 1-514-etc. Within the 514 area, it wasn't used, you just dialled 7 digits. Much as we here use the area codes 9, 3, etc (ie: 9-479-xxxx - but with no preceding '1-', of course).

Thinking about that now (suppressing the very human "That's what we did... so why didn't everybody else ?" reaction), I can see that in the bigger (than Canadian) US cities like NY and LA, they would have needed multiple 'area codes' within one city - just to create enough numbers. So that would've led to local calls into neighbouring area codes - so they needed something beyond the '1-' preamble.

It's really easy to forget how linear & sequential machinery once had to be - stuff had to work down a decision tree.
So easy now just to grab an entire 30-digit number, parse it five different ways, error-check it - and deal with it differently on alternate Tuesdays ;-)

pdh

343 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3247501 11-Jun-2024 16:08

evnafets - thank you for setting me straight.
You are very right - and I was forgetting the leading 0's for landline long distance.
That does make it consistent.
I guess the difference was that you always had to include the 0 in a mobile call (T believe) - even if you were calling from one 021 number to another.

Sharesies

Trade NZ and US shares and funds with Sharesies (affiliate link).

richms

28180 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3247502 11-Jun-2024 16:10

pdh:

Richard - that's interesting, when abouts did those US problems happen ?
I should read up on historic telephone numbering protocols.
It must be strewn with earnest committees and many 'what-we-should've-dones'.

In my life I've gone from 3 digits (rural Canada, party-line - early '50's), up to 4 within our village, then the pita blow when we had to add a 3-digit preamble to make 7 digits (my teen years). I came to NZ in '82 (Auckland N shore - so my landlines here were already of the 7-digit format), but I remember some rural NZ exchanges (ie: Gt Barrier) were still using fewer digits.

My old Canadian area code was 514 - which conforms to your middle-digit rule - but we never used '514' unless we used a preamble '1' to signify we were embarking on a long-distance call. Nobody ever dialled 514-xxx-xxxx, it was always 1-514-etc. Within the 514 area, it wasn't used, you just dialled 7 digits. Much as we here use the area codes 9, 3, etc (ie: 9-479-xxxx - but with no preceding '1-', of course).

Thinking about that now (suppressing the very human "That's what we did... so why didn't everybody else ?" reaction), I can see that in the bigger (than Canadian) US cities like NY and LA, they would have needed multiple 'area codes' within one city - just to create enough numbers. So that would've led to local calls into neighbouring area codes - so they needed something beyond the '1-' preamble.

It's really easy to forget how linear & sequential machinery once had to be - stuff had to work down a decision tree.
So easy now just to grab an entire 30-digit number, parse it five different ways, error-check it - and deal with it differently on alternate Tuesdays ;-)

If it was a free call to another area code, you dialed it without the 1, just the area code and the number so you were not charged for it. I cant remember exactly when it happened but it was when they got the 1-888 toll free numbers and I recall loads of places couldn't call them because of legacy equipment and its handling of numbers. Once they got the extra area codes available they started to have the same 3 digits as both an area code and a prefix in area code and that's when it all went to 10 digit dialing.

Here all the changes to 7 digit numbers and angering the people living in the boonies into having to dial more numbers was done before clear came along so that it was easier to process calls as they didn't have to worry about the varying lengths. I don't know it it was all the NEC gear back then or if they still had some older crap hanging on.

Richard rich.ms

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
79285 posts

Uber Geek

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#3247559 11-Jun-2024 16:52

@pdh:

OK - bit rude to post it in this forum... so apologies, but ;-)

Geekzone main page dynamically adds a sentence 'Update paused until browser tab is in focus again'.

Which should be OK - but causes me grief.

When I return to the page - to click & hold on the next interesting thread - to drag it to another window - the popup sentence disappears, the page re-formats, the list shuffles up, and my cursor lands on the wrong spot (and accidentally 'selects' half the page).

It's maddening !!!!

Can I suppress the pop-up or can there be a same-size place-holder (maybe 'Auto-updating active again') to avoid the page re-format ?

I don't see this happening... Now.

richms

28180 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3247563 11-Jun-2024 17:07

freitasm:

I don't see this happening... Now.

OMG finally. that annoyed me so much!

Richard rich.ms

pdh

343 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3247704 12-Jun-2024 00:41

freitasm... Many Many Many thanks for spending the time & effort to tweak the Geekzone page-jumping.

I really do appreciate it.

Groucho

524 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3251219 20-Jun-2024 14:35

Just registered for Airpoints. Registered the account and logged in at airnewzealand.co.nz. Was prompted to optionally enable 2FA with a Passkey. Excellent, Bitwarden supports that so generate new passkey. Bitwarden browser plugin popup prompts to save said passkey... but no saved entry for the website. Huh? I'd saved it less than two minutes prior.

On closer inspection the passkey was generated with the different URL of airnewzealand.com so couldn't match the base URL with my saved login. ARGH!

Deleted passkey, added the second URL to the saved login item and generated new passkey.

Behodar

10508 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3255803 3-Jul-2024 08:40

Not "design" per se, but an email in Outlook just disappeared without a trace while I was in the middle of reading it. It vanished out of the message list (it hasn't gone into Deleted or Junk) and the preview switched to showing the previous message in the list. Doing a search for all emails from that sender doesn't show it. I did not get one of those "sender has recalled this message" notices. What in the world happened?!

Edit: Looks like she actually did do a recall, as 20 minutes later she's re-sent it with slightly different information. So I'm putting this back in the "brain dead design" category, since data should never disappear without explanation.

richms

28180 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3255833 3-Jul-2024 10:08

Recalling an email is the dumbest idea to allow ever. The only thing that they should be able to do is flag the email as disregard.

Richard rich.ms

Groucho

524 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3255937 3-Jul-2024 11:13

richms:

Recalling an email is the dumbest idea to allow ever. The only thing that they should be able to do is flag the email as disregard.

Recalling is a good idea in principle but pointless unless it's an industry standard thing, not just a proprietary Outlook thing. I've had emails come to me then received the 'recall' email. My Apple Mail app doesn't care.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | ... | 29