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Just Let Me Write Digits

gendx.dev

41–50 of 89 posts

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#41
post #22

I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!

a password with a space at the end would be broken in many systems.

Does anyone even use passwords with spaces? I've always wanted to try and find out how many sites can't handle it.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#42
post #3

Web developer classic: use Javascript to replace the native, working, internationally supported standard inputs with a different input mechanism that doesn't work. (saving you a click: AZERTY has digits on the shift key, and for some reason the JS is handling raw keys rather than processed characters)

I've seen cases where it was done well, but unless you're willing to invest great engineering effort into making sure it's done well, the built-in version (which already has had a lot of engineering effort put into it) is almost always going to be better.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#43
post #9

I'm curious if there's a reason this six-cell mechanism has become the defacto? It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must be an underlying reason I'm missing.

I'm guessing someone at some point thought that preventing copy and paste would stop bots, then everyone copied them.

That sounds quite likely. Not the stopping bots part, just the idea that someone chose to do it for some reason, and everybody copied them without knowing the reason. Happens all too often.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#44
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a password with a space at the end would be broken in many systems.

Does anyone even use passwords with spaces? I've always wanted to try and find out how many sites can't handle it.

I use spaces everywhere I can, it’s part of a pattern I use that’s easy for me to remember for when I have to enter it often, and the space usually counts as a special character. I’d say 90-95% of the time it works.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#45
post #9

I'm curious if there's a reason this six-cell mechanism has become the defacto? It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must be an underlying reason I'm missing.

> It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately Anecdotally, this seems to be the case on the majority of websites where I have to use such 2FA codes.

Santander's banking website uses both in some places, e.g. confirming a new payment. "Enter your 5-digit PIN and the 6-digit 2FA code we've just sent you", with 5 little input fields for the former, and a single standard input field for the latter. Perhaps a deliberate decision to make them look different, but it just looks like they couldn't make up their mind.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#46
post #39
post #19

> So statistically speaking I’m surprised that this bug hasn’t been noticed and fixed yet! I'm not so surprised, given that you cannot write support tickets if the bug prevents you from registering... Also, I don't think people have high hopes that a broken government website will ever get fixed.

Yes, for every time a bug like this is discovered and reported, there are probably hundreds of times when someone else just gave up or found a work around after much frustration. I'm frequently astonished by how terrible and buggy modern software can get away with being and still survive. Working around bugs to accomplish what I need to accomplish is so normal to me now that I sometimes don't even notice how terrible…

One problem I notice with FLOSS is this.

If you have an issue with an open source software, you need to register on a website that is made for developers, that will try to sell you a git hosting service, write a bug following a technical format, and you are expected to given information in a reproducible way.

If you have an issue with a closed source freeware, you just use a contact form on their website or leave a comment on their blog or whatever.

The amount of friction to report a bug that FLOSS puts on users is absolutely insane. It's almost like it's trying to deny anyone who isn't a technical person from reporting problems they are having.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#47
post #38
post #22

I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!

In Canada our postal codes are formatted: X#X #X# Where X is a letter and # is a digit. The amount of forms, even on government websites that can't do the unfathomably complicated logic of stripping the space if it doesn't want it is baffling. Regarding your credit card example, in my password manager where I paste my credit card number from, I added a no-spaces copy of the number for me to paste in because practical…

Not having the space looks and feels wrong, and I think the post office would agree. I have a feeling the trend toward space omission was due to fields formatted for US zips.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a password with a space at the end would be broken in many systems.

Does anyone even use passwords with spaces? I've always wanted to try and find out how many sites can't handle it.

If you're living the passphrase life then spaces make them easier to type.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#49
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for every time a bug like this is discovered and reported, there are probably hundreds of times when someone else just gave up or found a work around after much frustration. I'm frequently astonished by how terrible and buggy modern software can get away with being and still survive. Working around bugs to accomplish what I need to accomplish is so normal to me now that I sometimes don't even notice how terrible…

One problem I notice with FLOSS is this. If you have an issue with an open source software, you need to register on a website that is made for developers, that will try to sell you a git hosting service, write a bug following a technical format, and you are expected to given information in a reproducible way. If you have an issue with a closed source freeware, you just use a contact form on their website or leave a c…

GitHub is meant for developers. Plenty of OSS has forums or Zulip/Discord chats for ordinary users to get support in a more casual way. Sometimes not, but there's just as much closed source software with poor support too.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#50
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone even use passwords with spaces? I've always wanted to try and find out how many sites can't handle it.

If you're living the passphrase life then spaces make them easier to type.

I do but then again I am different in that I built a secondary keyboard that (macro) types long passwords for me. Bank site: Shift H. Think of it as a password manager that has an encrypted index (my brain) using hardware and without the index is mess of random characters. Portable and external.
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