WTF on TDWTF
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I was reading the sidebar at work, pretending to be working, as usual, and I wanted to reply to a post. I forgot that I had logged out so it took me to the "Sign In" page. Somehow, I clicked on Sign In again while on that page and didn't notice that the URL changed. I typed in my login details, clicked the Sign In button and kaboom! I got a 404 (yes, it was a 404, not the usual "Page not found"). It took me a second to realize what I've done so I tried to reproduce it, this time clicking on the Sign In link a few times, then filling in the login details and clicking the Sign In button. Kaboom: "Bad request"
Apparently that's because it sends a "return to" url via GET and every time you click on the Sign In link, that URL changes. Still, it shouldn't give me a 404 after logging in; btw, TDWTF has a custom 404 and I'm sure that works normally, but in my case it didn't, I got just the classic "404 - Page not found .... bla bla .... contact your admin even if he's got nothing to do with this .... bla bla bla"
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In terms of WTFs concerning the forum software, this is pretty minor. Try checking out how tags work sometime.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Here's a better idea: Don't. At least not if you don't want to lose what little faith in humanity you had left.Try checking out how tags work sometime.
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@j6cubic said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Try checking out how tags work sometime.
Here's a better idea: Don't. At least not if you don't want to lose what little faith in humanity you had left.
I don't have any more faith in humanity, so I have nothing to lose anyway.
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@j6cubic said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Here's a better idea: Don't. At least not if you don't want to lose what little faith in humanity you had left.Try checking out how tags work sometime.
Isn't annihilating the tattered shred of faith in humanity that naive people cling to the point of this site?
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@morbiuswilters said:
Try checking out how tags work sometime.
I don't believe you. *You* claim they work, but you're hardly a trustworthy source on these things...
Pre-post edit: Oh god that's borked.
Post-post edit: That's even worse than I'd thought.
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@rohypnol said:
I typed in my login details, clicked the Sign In button and kaboom! I got a 404
That is probably actually better than what happened on two of the three web sites upon which I've been called in to perform general fixes. Before I corrected their behavior, if one went straight to the login page (either linked from off-site, bookmarked, or typed the URL in manually) and logged in, it would log you in, and take you to the login page. Only the very clever noticed that one of those sites updated the upper-right corner from 'not logged in' to 'logged in as $user'1. The other site, however, gave no clues at all.
With either of those sites, you could then navigate away or even use other bookmarks for the site, and it'd all work (thanks to the magic of cookies). That, of course, didn't stop the helpdesk calls. Not that either of the groups who ran those websites said, "Help, we're being inundated with calls from users who can't successfully log in." or anything similar. Rather, the plea was, "Our web site performs a bit sluggishly at times, could you optimize it a little? We've heard you're good at that." For what it's worth, I *do* consider eliminating needless re-logins to be an optimization. However, I also class it as a bug fix, and I consider that designation to be more important.
1 To compensate for this flagrant excess of useful information, this web site also helpfully displayed the text, "invalid employee number or password, please try again" in big, bold, red letters above the username box. For confirmation, yes, it prompted for username, but complained that the employee number wasn't right.
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@tgape said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Try checking out how tags work sometime.
I don't believe you. *You* claim they work, but you're hardly a trustworthy source on these things...
Pre-post edit: Oh god that's borked.
Post-post edit: That's even worse than I'd thought.
I wrote a Greasemonkey script several months ago to add a randomly-generated tag to every post. Myself and a few other users used it for about 3 months. When you are logged in the tags are output on every thread view page as a delimited, hidden input field. Eventually the randomly-generated tags totalled around 300k. Overall, almost half a meg of tags was output on every thread view page. Eventually Alex purged the tags and we were asked not to use the script anymore...
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Wait a second. So you and a few friends, let's say 6 people, got to 300k tags in 3 months by adding one tag per posting?
That would be ~50000 postings per person, or ~555 postings per person per day!
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@fourchan said:
Wait a second. So you and a few friends, let's say 6 people, got to 300k tags in 3 months by adding one tag per posting?
That would be ~50000 postings per person, or ~555 postings per person per day!
You're right, its kind of a paradox that someone capable of posting 500+ messages a day would have even one friend, let alone six.
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@fourchan said:
Wait a second. So you and a few friends, let's say 6 people, got to 300k tags in 3 months by adding one tag per posting?
300kB, not 300.000 tags (btw, the current tags seem to weight around 230kB).
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@morbiuswilters said:
Eventually Alex purged the tags and we were asked not to use the script anymore...
All of us are proud of you trying to ruin the forums for everyone.
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@morbiuswilters said:
When you are logged in the tags are output on every thread view page as a delimited, hidden input field.
Oh wow, I never noticed that. I was just adding random tags to reduce the entropy in my brain. Maybe I should stop.
