Helpful Error Message...



  • Entered my information and submitted. Reached this screen, and found that the 'sent' email wasn't arriving...

     

    On closer inspection, the url was:

    "http://portal.ogame.org/register.php?lang=de&result=success&error[0]=Currently+this+universe+is+complete.+New+accounts+cannot+be+registered" - great place to put the error message.



  • Ogame's new portal, not surprisingly, broke tons of stuff.

     

    Firefox no longer seems to remember usernames/passwords with it, and they also broke the FoxGame extension.



  • Oh wow, OGame. That brings back memories. A long time ago, I put a lot of effort into it and ended up as one of the top players in a small but powerful (and rapidly advancing) alliance. Then I realized that, like every other MMO I had played before, it was taking up all of my free time, so I quit. I sort of regret it because except for the soul-sucking that's seemingly inherent to MMOs, it was fun. And not just due to the fact that it was a PvP game and I far overshadowed most of the other players.



  • You do realise that graphics programs allow you to crop an image so that you can show just the important part at full size? Even Mac OS X's Preview and Windows Paint (select an area, Edit > Copy To...) can crop images. That way, I could read what on earth that page says. (I prefer to crop an image small, and make the image a link to the full-size image if there is anything to be gained from the uncropped image.)

    URL abuse however, is odd, but rampant. In cases like yours, normally, the message is read from the URL and displayed on the page, but from what was said above, it seems that it got broken and no longer does this. It's fun with such sites to alter the URL to say something daft; for example, you could change the above to "...&error[0]=your+mother+smells" and it would be displayed verbatim on the page.

    URLs end up holding all sorts of meaningless and redundant details. As no-one is likely to recall, I pointed out that on the page that came on TDWTF recently with a scissors-shaped calculator, most of the URL was redundant. You could remove almost all of the parameters and the page still worked. I didn't try seeing what happened if I switched them all to something incorrect or stupid. phpNuke/PostNuke both have huge amounts of redundant rubbish in URLs, making them ugly, confusing and very cumbersome to use. No URL should ever reach the length that it will get snapped into pieces by hard-wrapped plain-text e-mail, or go right off the side of a column of text (though blog templates that constrict the text into a column so narrow that all spelt-out URLs and all embedded images break and fall of the side and tangle up with the next column along, are just retarded).



  • @smartbei said:

    ...

    On closer inspection, the url was:

    "http://portal.ogame.org/register.php?lang=de&result=success&error[0]=Currently+this+universe+is+complete.+New+accounts+cannot+be+registered" - great place to put the error message.


    A successful error? :P
    And what's with the "lang=de"? It looks English to me...


Log in to reply