At my university they had done something even more impressive. In order to change your password (which they made you do every six months) you had to type Eagle\foo.bar even though you've been typing foo.bar as your username the whole time and you have no idea what Eagle is. Luckily they put the helpful suggestion "type Eagle\ before your username" above the username text field.
Why is this shameful practice so common?
21–30 of 40 posts
Re: Why is this shameful practice so common?
#22In some way it is a security feature... Some keyloggers are set to record when a combination of '4 number + space + 4 number + etc'. This is why my bank removed the first 4 numbers (which are common to everyone) when I login to my account. Also, they switch automatically to the password field as if it was a continuation of the number.
Re: Why is this shameful practice so common?
#23Back when we were working on online shopping, this was always my litmus test for competence.
There might be some rationale behind the survival of this practice.
You see, the user likes to be sure: when the site works the way (s)he expacts, the user is happy. When it doesn't, the user gets frustrated. When the program gives the user text field of arbitrary length without giving explicit instructions how to fill it (i.e. "no dashes or spaces") the user might be just a bit afraid if the computer will parse the number correctly.
Credit card number is sensitive financial information, and people are not likely to be comfortable with making second guesses about entering it. Probably the freedom of entering the 16 digits the way user wants just doesn't outweigh the benefit of knowing that the site will behave the expected way by any significant margin?
Or those programmers (designers?) might just be incompetent.
P.S The "4 text boxes" solution (with or without auto jumping to the next field) might survive because of the same reason too: It elegantly reminds you about the format of data you are allowed to enter, so you can be sure that your input is parsed all right.
Re: Why is this shameful practice so common?
#24The example code I've seen from popular payment gateways is some of the worst code I've ever seen and that's usually the code the web developers start with. It's obvious the original authors of payment API examples has zero experience with each language. It's doesn't surprise me that the whole payment gateway feels and operates like one giant hack.
Re: Why is this shameful practice so common?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course - We do it. Wondering if anyone uses a payment gateway which prohibits this..
how could they possibly even know you've already stripped out non-numeric characters?
Audit. Our code is audited and certified by a security firm contracted by our merchant service provider (read bank). They don't have any such anti-transformation provision, but I'm curious to know if any payment gateway does.
Re: Why is this shameful practice so common?
#26At my university they had done something even more impressive. In order to change your password (which they made you do every six months) you had to type Eagle\foo.bar even though you've been typing foo.bar as your username the whole time and you have no idea what Eagle is. Luckily they put the helpful suggestion "type Eagle\ before your username" above the username text field.
Sounds vaguely like the domain-feces of a Microsoft operating system, although Universities usually go with Unix :-)
Re: Why is this shameful practice so common?
#27http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/you-suck.html
My other major rant is when an application presents information to you in a certain format but won't accept it in the same format. So if they display the credit card number with spaces, and I copy/paste it into their own application, they reject it!
My bank fixed this bug, but for years they would display the credit card balance with a $ and a comma for more than a thousand; $1,234.56. But could I paste "$1,234.56" into the amount field when paying the balance off? Noooooo, "$" and "," are illegal characters!
Call me crazy, but when I speak to you in your own language, I want you to understand what I'm saying :-)
Re: Why is this shameful practice so common?
#28Back when we were working on online shopping, this was always my litmus test for competence.
There might be some rationale behind the survival of this practice. You see, the user likes to be sure: when the site works the way (s)he expacts, the user is happy. When it doesn't, the user gets frustrated. When the program gives the user text field of arbitrary length without giving explicit instructions how to fill it (i.e. "no dashes or spaces") the user might be just a bit afraid if the computer will parse the…
American Express cards express the number with three fields. The first field has 4 digits, the second has 6, and the last has 5 - yes the number is only 15 digits long.
Re: Why is this shameful practice so common?
#29I love the "please enter your account number exactly as it appears on your statement" prompts which then require you to skip dashes/spaces which DO appear on the statement.
Burn in usability hell..
Re: Why is this shameful practice so common?
#30In some way it is a security feature... Some keyloggers are set to record when a combination of '4 number + space + 4 number + etc'. This is why my bank removed the first 4 numbers (which are common to everyone) when I login to my account. Also, they switch automatically to the password field as if it was a continuation of the number.
That's silly, because the same keyloggers can recognize sequences of 16 digits as a credit card number, particularly since they can be easily checksummed for confirmation.