NS Hispeed doesn't want me to travel with them :(



  • I want to travel to Rotterdam today (Feb 14th) so I thought, "I'll order a ticket online". I went to the website, filled out everything, and chose a payment method. I've chosen iDeal as I don't have a CC. For those unaware of what iDeal is: it's a Dutch solution for paying online. You order something on a website, choose your bank (Postbank, Rabobank, ABN AMRO, ...) and you're redirected to the online banking website of your own bank. After you pay (the interface looks like that of a regular transfer) you're redirected back to the website with a special URL, so the site knows the payment has been made.

    So, I wanted to pay with iDeal. I got this:

    Let me tell you what it says here:

    On the top, there are the various steps in the ordering process. Travel wishes, time and price, summary, payment and confirmation. Below that are the things I've asked: my name, phone number, e-mail address, how I want my ticket (homeprint, meaning I print my own ticket), from (Antwerp), to (Rotterdam), etc. etc. Below that table: "Please select one of the following payment methods:"

    On the page before, I've already selected iDeal. So I expect to see a dropdown of banks, where I can pick my own bank (ABN AMRO) and pay for my ticket. But somehow that's not possible. They don't want my money, so it seems.



  • Might want to change that image out, there should be enough information to find out the spots you tried to hide. Just cover them with solid black bars, why does everyone try to use mosiac or whatever?



  • I'm pretty sure you are supposed to copy and paste your money into the blank space. 



  • @Lingerance said:

    Might want to change that image out, there should be enough information to find out the spots you tried to hide. Just cover them with solid black bars, why does everyone try to use mosiac or whatever?
     

    Not to mention 80% of the image is pure whitespace that could be cropped out.



  • Nah, it's not the most top-secret information. It's easily found elsewhere on the web (WHOIS). And I don't like black bars, they're so large and... black. And I left the whitespace intentionally ;)

     

    LOL @ superjer btw.



  • The real WTF is that the company is called NS Highspeed! In a country right next to Germany! Don't their marketing guys use wikipedia?



  • NS Stands for "Nederlandse Spoorwegen": Dutch Railways (also in the Wikipedia article which you linked to). I don't see what the problem is. It's not as if railway companies are in politics! Next you're gonna ask Nova Scotia to stop using NS in its postal abbreviation!

     And believe me, if the Germans had had a problem with that name, they'd have told us long ago!



  • I don't know about the other 80 million people in this country, but "NS Highspeed" makes me think of the Autobahn. The first ones were build by.....you guessed it. And that's something almost everybody knows here. Of course nobody will protest this name, it just has negative connotations.



  • @wittgenstein said:

    Of course nobody will protest this name, it just has negative connotations.

    I'm confused.  Call me ignorant, but what are the negative connotations of associating yourself with a road on which you can go whatever speed you please?  Or is it the other way around?



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @wittgenstein said:

    Of course nobody will protest this name, it just has negative connotations.

    I'm confused.  Call me ignorant, but what are the negative connotations of associating yourself with a road on which you can go whatever speed you please?  Or is it the other way around?

     

    To me, it sounds like he is loosely implying it was built by the Nazis.

    "Since Hitler did not become Chancellor until January 1933, the idea that the Autobahn was a work of Nazi engineering is a myth."  -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn

     



  •  "Telefoon," "Bezorggegevens," "Spoorwegen."  Man, I love Dutch!



  • @Tsela said:

     And believe me, if the Germans had had a problem with that name, they'd have told us long ago!

    "Problem? What problem? We were on vacation! All of us! From 1933 to 1945!



  • @bstorer said:

     "Telefoon," "Bezorggegevens," "Spoorwegen."  Man, I love Dutch!

    ?

    Random ordinary words are amusing because why?



  • @dhromed said:

    @bstorer said:

     "Telefoon," "Bezorggegevens," "Spoorwegen."  Man, I love Dutch!

    ?

    Random ordinary words are amusing because why?

     

    Because I don't speak Dutch.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @belgariontheking said:

    @wittgenstein said:

    Of course nobody will protest this name, it just has negative connotations.

    I'm confused.  Call me ignorant, but what are the negative connotations of associating yourself with a road on which you can go whatever speed you please?  Or is it the other way around?

     

    To me, it sounds like he is loosely implying it was built by the Nazis.

    "Since Hitler did not become Chancellor until January 1933, the idea that the Autobahn was a work of Nazi engineering is a myth."  -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn

    Thanks, MPS.



  • @bstorer said:

    @dhromed said:

    Random ordinary words are amusing because why?

     

    Because I don't speak Dutch.

    Ik moet iets met dat gegeven kunnen. Muahaha.

    Or something. 



  • Re: NS Hispeed doesn't want me Q: Browser problem?

    Do you use Firefox with the NoScript extension? Too many sites like this work perfectly well with Javascript turned off up until somewhere in the payment process, which frequently involves contacting sites other than the main one, and which sometimes break fatally with Javscript turned off...

    If you're lucky, the breakage happens early in the process so you can back up a few steps, turn on Javascript and go ahead, but sometimes you are left in some kind of limbo not knowing whether your transaction has been submitted or not.  



  • @Alex Media said:

    On the top, there are the various steps in the ordering process.
    Travel wishes, time and price, summary, payment and confirmation. Below
    that are the things I've asked: my name, phone number, e-mail address,
    how I want my ticket (homeprint, meaning I print my own ticket), from
    (Antwerp), to (Rotterdam), etc. etc. Below that table: "Please select
    one of the following payment methods:"

    On the page before, I've already selected iDeal. So I expect to see a dropdown of banks, where I can pick my own bank (ABN AMRO) and pay for my ticket. But somehow that's not possible. They don't want my money, so it seems.

     

    Well, either that, or you've blocked scripts or cookies in your browser, or you've got an ad-blocker, or a hosts file, that happens to be blocking one of the servers involved in the transaction, or ....   It's pretty hard for anyone to know whether this is a WTF from our end.

    @Alex Media said:

    After you pay (the interface looks like that of a regular transfer) you're redirected back to the website with a special URL, so the site knows the payment has been made.

     

    And *there* is the real wtf.  Your money has already been transferred, and the only record of it is a session token in a URL in a redirect?  What happens if the connection goes down, or your browser crashes, or the cat trips over the modem?  Where's the transactional ACID there?



  • @DaveK said:

    Your money has already been transferred, and the only record of it is a session token in a URL in a redirect?

    There's no session token in the final redirect URL, or anything identifying that anything was done, really. After all's done, all that iDeal does is send a buyer back to one of 3 URLs you (or your web developer) defined at the start. These URLs are for the various transaction states; success, failure and, um, something else. I forget. The transaction is stored in two places, and hopefully three:

    1. your bank's transaction history;
    2. the "iDeal dashboard". Shopkeepers are required to manage their stuff with it. I don't fully know how it works, so I can't say what wtfs it may or may not contain, though it does sound like double work for whoever manages the products for sale. At least some automation is possible: I upgrade my phone's credit via Vodafone's iDeal which is obviously not a manual process;
    3. some purchase history table in your webshop's backend.
    I've only done an implementation of the Light edition, which boils down to writing a form and posting the data to the bank's server, which has its own iDeal business in order. It's been a while, so I'm hazy on the details. There was a hash involved, so it must be good. ;)


  • Ad-blocker, check, but disabled. No hosts-file. No NoScript, no cookie-blocking :)

     

    And iDeal is pretty solid, the Dutch Wikipedia-article explains it a bit. Machine-translated version.



  • My Firefox want's to open that link with the MS File TRansfer Manager :-( 


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