His complaint:

May I say that a content management system that–if you have been off dealing with another crisis in the middle of a task–decides when you come back and try to save your work that you are no longer logged in and dumps you to a login page after which it dumps you not on the page you were working on but on the root page, LOSING YOUR WORK!!!1!!

Such a content management system is HELLSPAWN!! Is WROSE THAN HILTER!1!!!1!…

He is complaining about bspace, which is based on the open-source
Sakai, a content management system written in Java, and focused on the needs of universities.

I think Delong’s post is a good reminder of how infuriating it can be for users when software fails to behave in the ways users expect. I also suspect this is a good example of an issue that users will regard as a bug, but the programmers will see it simply as a potential future feature that they may or may not add (”Should we catch POST info if a user is not logged in?”).

I should add, WordPress has exactly the same problem. Last week I started writing what I thought would be a short post for this blog, but I got carried away by my theme and wrote a long post. Then I went to get some dinner. I left the browser open, with the post unpublished. I came back after dinner and made some more edits, then hit the publish button – and just like that, my work vanished, because while I was out getting dinner, WordPress logged me out (for some reason I’d assumed that the auto-save feature was also refreshing my session info).

One of the nice things about building my own CMS was that I was free to fix the bugs that bothered me most, and this was a big one for me. I added a feature to my CMS that caught any POST info and showed it on screen, even if the person was logged out. This allowed recovery of the post. I worked on my CMS from 2002-2007 and then abandoned it because I could not keep up with projects like WordPress. Nowadays I force myself to use other people’s open source software, because it is economically rational to do so, but I hate some of the choices they make, and some of the features that they fail to implement.

In the comments, Jacob Davies posts this comment, which I thought was very funny and very on point:

Conversation that has happened more times in my career than I care to mention:

Someone else: “How long of a title shall we allow? 32 characters? 64?”

Me: “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY DO WE NEED TO SET A MAXIMUM LENGTH? IS THIS 1952???”

Someone else: “But what if they put in a really long title and fill up the database?”

Me: “THE VERY NEXT FIELD – THE ‘CONTENTS’ FIELD – IS A FREE-TEXT FIELD WITHOUT A LENGTH CONSTRAINT SO IF THEY WANTED TO FILL THE DATABASE THEY COULD DO IT THERE ANYWAY.”

Someone else: “Won’t it waste space if we allow a variable-length string in the title?”

Me: “OH MY GOD YES A TERRIFYING LOSS OF ABOUT 3 BYTES ON A RECORD THAT IS A MINIMUM OF 1024 BYTES LONG AND OFTEN OVER A MEGABYTE, YOU ARE SO RIGHT.”

Someone else: “Yes but every other system has a length constraint for titles.”

Me: “YES AND I SUPPOSE IF EVERYONE ELSE WAS JUMPING OFF A BRIDGE YOU’D DO IT TOO.”

etc

Computer programmers are subject to some kind of strange mental degeneration in which they rate the potential waste of 0.00001% of the capacity of a modern hard disk as more important than the ability to enter titles longer than 32 characters in length.

I think its fine to print debugging information to the screen when a website is under development, but on a live site, I think the error messages should try to be more helpful. Perhaps the error message can suggest the average speed it takes the site’s sysadmins to fix problems of this time. Or the error message can suggest that the visitor go get the page out of the Google cache. Even the cutesy error message that Stikipad used was more reassuring than this.

Upon submitting the form, I got the following error message:

This is, of course, an example of bad user interface design. They should not allow me to choose a date which they themselves forbid. It is confusing that their form should offer a date which is, in fact, not allowed.

I won’t use a hosted web service like Typepad or weblogs.com. It’s too easy for them to decide that you’re ‘violating’ terms of service, and next thing you know, all your weblog entries are gone. I saw this with wordpress.com in the recent events that caused so much discussion: in fact, I would strongly recommend against using wordpress.com because of this–the service is too easily influenced by public opinion.

I don’t use either my Yahoo or Gmail mail accounts. Regardless of whether I can get a copy of my email locally, if I decide to not use either account I have no way of ‘redirecting’ email addresses from either of these to the email address I want to use. (Or if there is a way, I’m not aware of it.) Getting a copy of my data is not an exit strategy–it’s an export strategy. An exit strategy is one where you can blow off the service and not suffer long-term consequences. A ‘bad’ email address is definitely a long-term consequence*.

A few months ago we started using Stikipad to get ourselves organized. We started using the site under conditions that were close to an emergency – we had a web site that was past its deadline, and we were trying to regain control over a situation that had become chaotic. We began to post bug reports and notes to ourselves. Stikipad was useful to us as an easy-to-use online notepad, which we could use informally. It helped that it also had certain wiki features – it kept track of who made each edit, and it allowed us to revert changes when we made mistakes in editing.

Since then, we’ve started listing all the hours that we work on there. This data is vital for when we send out invoices to our clients. Also, all of the long, complicated to-do lists, for each project we’ve been working on, are all on there. We did not realize how important the site had become to us – we’d set up a quick, free account as a simple way to organize one project, but our use of Stikipad has grown so that lately it has been central to the way we schedule our time.

For the last three days, when we go to the site, the only thing we get is this error page:

The whole entire site has been down. You could not start a new account, nor reach any of the pages on our account, nor even reach the “Support” page. We all kept trying, at different times during Friday, Saturday and Sunday. There was no way into the site.

The site just came back to life tonight. But we are planning on giving it up. We feel we can’t trust it anymore. There has been no word on the Stikipad blog about what just happened. Their silence does not inspire confidence in us.

Stikipad does have an export option, which we could use religiously to keep our data safe. I blame myself for not already automating a daily download of this data. I’m fixing this particular oversight tonight. All the same, Stikipad can’t value our most vital data to the same extent we can, so it is perhaps best if we keep that data on our own server, and make the multiple backups of that data which we feel is needed.

Part of what is becoming a continuing series on the subject of broken web pages.

Just curious, but does anyone know some common reasons why the CSS files might fail to load?

Also curious about the marketing. The front page of the site is aimed entirely at women. Do women buy clothes online more than men?

Today I figured I’d try to use my phone to pay the bill. I hit “*2″ which dialed customer service for me. I reached an automated voicemail system. It asked me to type in my phone number, so it could look up my account information. I did so. It then told me that I owed Sprint $513. I was stunned. By my calculations, I owe something like $200. I pay about $97 a month, and I owe last month and this month. I’m not sure how the amount doubled.

Eventually, the automated system gave me the option to talk to someone. I pressed the button.

A pleasant, helpful woman got on the line and asked for my telephone number, so she could look up my account information. I gave her the number and she said they had no account information for me. I explained that I’d had this account with Sprint since March of 2001. She explained that she worked for Nextel, she didn’t have account info for Sprint customers (the two companies are merging).

This is puzzling. If Nextel doesn’t have any of my account information, then why should my phone auto-dial Nextel when I press the buttons for customer service? Also, if Nextel has no information about me, how did the automated system tell me that I owed $513?

What happened next is also puzzling. I said, “Okay, can you transfer me to Sprint Customer Service?” She said she could not transfer me there. She could, however, give me the phone number. Why can’t the phone company transfer me to the number they want me to go to? I find that confusing.

I dialed the number she gave me.
Sprint PCS also had an automated system. It asked me to type in my telephone number, so it could look up my account information. I typed in my telephone number. It said there was no account with that number, and it suggested I type it again. I assumed I’d mis-typed it, so I tried it again, carefully. Again, the automated voice system told me that there was no account with that number. I didn’t know what else to do, so I typed in the number a 3rd time. Again it told me there was no such telephone number.

I couldn’t think of what to do then. The automated voice system did not give me any other option. It kept asking me to type in my telephone number. It asked me 4 more times, and then, when I did nothing, it hung up on me. It never offered to transfer me to a human operator, who might have been able to resolve the situation.

I’ve had this account for 6 and half years. Right now, I seem to be completely locked out of it. The computer at Sprint PCS claims my account doesn’t exist. At Nextel, the computer says I owe the incredible amount of $513, and then the operator says she has no access to my account information because it is over at Sprint.

I don’t need to know many of the details to tell that the merger of Sprint and Nextel databases is going badly. If I had stock, I’d sell it. This is the worst customer service experience I’ve had in many years.

You’ll recall from my previous post that Sprint PCS wrote me on the 17th and said they’d contact me within 3 business days to follow up regarding this matter. I’ve yet to hear from them. Of course, my phone service just got cut off because I have not been able to pay the bill. So maybe they tried to call but couldn’t get through. Ironic, yes? If only they’d let me into their site, I could activate my phone and they could call me to tell me, no doubt with great sincerity, that Sprint PCS really cares about its customers.

I went to pay my monthly cell phone bill. Just last month, SprintPCS instituted a new policy, requiring stricter passwords with more letters and numbers in them. So I was forced to change my password. Perhaps I was also in a hurry, as I did not write it down in the usual place.

Today, unable to remember the new password, I clicked the link they offer for “Forgot your password?” I came to the screen you see in the first image.

I typed in my “username”, which is simply my telephone number. When I hit the submit button, I got, in response, a blank white page with the text “Error: 500″. That’s it. Nothing else. Just that text on a blank white page. You can see it in this second image:

I offer this anecodote as one more small piece of evidence for the case that most web sites are horribly programmed and poorly tested. I don’t mean to pick on SprintPCS, since there are many sites that are just as bad, but this just happens to be the broken website that I interacted with today.

Mind you, the above incident happened this morning, around 11 AM, and now it is 11 PM. I just went back to get screenshots. Twelve hours later, the problem is still there.

I sent SprintPCS an email about this. I have not yet heard back from them. I’ll update this post if I do hear from them.

UPDATE: wonderful response time. I just got this, on the 17th. The irony:

Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:08:18 -0500 [02:08:18 PM CDT]

From: Sprint Customer Solutions <ecare@cc.sprintpcs.com>

To: LAWRENCE@KRUBNER.COM

Subject: Re: Subject: ID # 20070914212929 (KMM38317571I123L0KM)

Hello Lawrence Krubner,

Thank you for contacting Sprint.

A ticket has been submitted in reference to the difficulty you are experiencing logging into your account online at Sprint.com. The ticket number is 16880851.

A follow-up call will be made to you within 36 business hours.

Thank you again for contacting Sprint. We appreciate your business.

Mary O.
E-Care
Sprint
“Where our customers come first!”

Refer someone to Sprint and get $25.

So after 3 days, they send me an email in which they promise to contact me within 3 days. Then they close with “Where our customers come first!” Hate to think how we’d be treated if we came second.