New blogger account: count the WTFs



  • WTF I found on Blogger's new account page increasing WTF-ness (www.blogger.com, click on 'Create a Blog')


    1. Have to reenter passwords when page refreshes (okay, that's probably a feature)
    2. unreadable captchas. nothing like being a human and failing a Turing test. WTF does this sayImage Hosted by ImageShack.us?
    3. no button to generate a new captcha. you need to reload, and enter your passwords again
    4. click on the handicapped button and you hear a bunch of unrelated characters (like being visually impaired isn't bad enough, blogger has to make fun of you too)


  •  not Blogger only, unreadable captcha's are more and more common, especially since OCR programs used by spammers are about as good at solving them as humans are.

     

    Ohh and duuuh, it's 'voncloorit'



  • Blogger itself is a single, terrifyingly enormous WTF.



  • @dtech said:

    not Blogger only, unreadable captcha's are more and more common, especially since OCR programs used by spammers are better at solving them as humans are.
    FTFY.



  •  It's definitely one of Google's worst products. What are some other bad ones, Orkut, that weird Chat+webpages thing they were pushing a few months ago that nobody actually used. 

    I had a problem setting up a blogger account for the wife (she didn't like the standalone ones I hosted for her and just decided to use blogger, not worth arguing over). Apparently someone had previously owned the domain years ago and let it expire, and had used google apps for domains. Well, blogger shits the bed if you try to use a domain name that also has a google apps account associated with it and has no control to say "just make this work, I don't care about apps". Google's automated password recovery thing where you set the cname in your DNS just wasn't working (tried for days and I'm not retarded, it's a simple process, it just wasn't working for whatever reason). Finding a goddamn way to contact someone at google was like... I dont' know I can't come up with an analogy, but it was damn hard, and I eventually found a link from some random-ass forum that leads to a very nondescript form at google that doesn't seem to indicate that it actually goes to anywhere, but apparently it does. Days later it was fixed, but... fuck...



  • @EJ_ said:

    Google's automated password recovery thing where you set the cname in your DNS just wasn't working (tried for days and I'm not retarded, it's a simple process, it just wasn't working for whatever reason).

    You're posting on TDWTF forums, you're retarded by default. Just look at me, or Morbs. (On second thoughts, don't look at him, you might get eye cancer.)

    And your story doesn't compare with the poor guy who Google locked out of his own Google Group for some unknown reason. Being the only administrator, he was unable to get back into the group, and it took THREE. FUCKING. YEARS. for Google to fix the issue.

    Not to mention the popular Blogger blogs where the pagination goes completely tits up when it actually has to page. Click on "See next 2000 posts" and you get shown an empty page, click Back and Forward and you get the correct page, click Back again and you'll be told there are no new posts



  • WTF version of Blogger are you guys using?  I've been doing one there for two years and had nothing remotely like these sorts of problems.  Maybe it only falls down in certain corner cases that I haven't hit?

     



  • Wow!  So is there any good reason at all to not use WordPress?  It may be PHP, which everyone loves to hate, but it "just works," which all the other blog software is still struggling with.



  • Yeah, my wife recently set up a blog, and I have to agree that blogger is horrid. There are apparently different ways you can edit your posts using their in-browser editor. And when you do it one way, the previews it shows you aren't WYSIWYG - they're just text in a default font in a small popup, but if you use the other editor (or maybe it's the same editor, but you enter it a different way - it's hard to tell which it is) when you click on preview, it shows you what the actual page will look like. It makes no sense at all.

    Their help system is horrible, too. And for some reason, it will randomly insert dozens of blank divs, leaving huge amounts of whitespace between her paragraphs. If you use the HTML editor, you can manually remove them, but if you use the not-quite-WYSIWYG editor, they don't show up and there's no way to remove them.

    When she enters text in their editor, the actual post ends up in a nice font with nice spacing. When her blog partner enters text into blogger's editor, it comes out in a different font with different spacing. Neither of them have changed any settings and they're both using the same model of computer, OS, and browser. They have no idea why it's different or how to fix it. It's very bizarre.



  • Well there's your problem!  You're making a blog powered by Community Server!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @emurphy said:

    WTF version of Blogger are you guys using?  I've been doing one there for two years and had nothing remotely like these sorts of problems.  Maybe it only falls down in certain corner cases that I haven't hit?
    Concur. I started one back in January of this year on blogspot, which -from what I can tell- is currently a synonym for it (only 20-odd posts so far - I'm not advertising it here!) and I'm failing to see any major WTF's with it as an author (compared to other blogs I've had the pleasure to comment on. )



    BTW, fun awaits when Google start incorporating reCAPTCHA (which they bought a while back, and have started (slowly) to integrate into Google.) I thought they'd be using it sooner...



  • @PJH said:

    I started one back in January of this year on blogspot, which -from what I can tell- is currently a synonym for it
     

    Blogger is the name of the service and the software; blogspot is the domain name where the blogs are hosted


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Someone You Know said:

    @PJH said:
    I started one back in January of this year on blogspot, which -from what I can tell- is currently a synonym for it

    Blogger is the name of the service and the software; blogspot is the domain name where the blogs are hosted
    Ah. Ta for the clarification. My point still remains however - I've yet to see any major WTF's with it (apart from when I changed the 'theme' and wondered why analytics decreed I'd had no visitors since changing it. Oh, I need to put the code back in? Duh! Of course I should have..... WTF yes. Google, no.)



  • @antonrojo said:

    2) unreadable captchas. nothing like being a human and failing a Turing test. WTF does this sayImage Hosted by ImageShack.us?

    undonu't?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @antonrojo said:
    2) unreadable captchas. nothing like being a human and failing a Turing test. WTF does this sayImage Hosted by ImageShack.us?

    undonu't?

     

    The worst kind of donut in the world.



  • It's still better than this...

     

     

     




  • Google seems to be totally incompetent when it comes to captchas.  I was away from home and tried to log onto my Gmail account from someone else's computer so I could send a couple of e-mails.  But I couldn't remember my password. (At home I access Gmail via POP3 and Thunderbird takes care that for me).

    So I try going to the "forgot password" page where I am presented with a captcha.  I type it in but Google says I typed it wrong. OK, no problem, just made a mistake.  I try again with a new captcha, this time being very careful to type it correctly.  Google says I entered it wrong.  About 20 more attempts and each time Google says I typed it wrong.  I gave up.



  • @mariushm said:

    It's still better than this...

    IIRC the Reimann one is a fake, but any programmer who thinks that solving math equations is a good idea for a CAPTCHA, is a smartass who should be shot - with rounds from a GAU-8.

    @El_Heffe said:

    Google seems to be totally incompetent when it comes to captchas.  I was away from home and tried to log onto my Gmail account from someone else's computer so I could send a couple of e-mails.  But I couldn't remember my password. (At home I access Gmail via POP3 and Thunderbird takes care that for me).

    So I try going to the "forgot password" page where I am presented with a captcha.  I type it in but Google says I typed it wrong. OK, no problem, just made a mistake.  I try again with a new captcha, this time being very careful to type it correctly.  Google says I entered it wrong.  About 20 more attempts and each time Google says I typed it wrong.  I gave up.

    Are you behind a proxy? I've found that quite often causes CAPTCHAs to go completely retarded and never work, no matter how many times you refresh. Yay for incomplete testing...



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    is a smartass who should be shot - with rounds from a GAU-8.
     

    ... more than one?!

     

    O_O



  • @dhromed said:

    @The_Assimilator said:

    is a smartass who should be shot - with rounds from a GAU-8.
     

    ... more than one?!

     

    O_O

    Granted, there probably won't be very much to shoot at after the first round has impacted, but I'm a firm proponent of overkill. Besides, should you get the opportunity to waste someone with a GAU-8, where's the fun in only firing a single round?



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    Besides, should you get the opportunity to waste someone with a GAU-8, where's the fun in only firing a single round?
     

    ... subtlety?

     

    Nyeh, that ship has sailed by the time the first uranium core unfolds into your opponent.

     

    And also just in case I get ambushed by a Decepticon.



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    I'm a firm proponent of overkill.
     

    That reminds me of the time I generated a world in Age of Empires (way back!), built a massive army of plain villagers, and tore right through the map's resources.

    Great fun watching your peons play only one or two wood-chopping animations before an entire forest is stumps, then seeing them carry tons of wood back ot storage.

    It's like a playable ant farm.



  • @dhromed said:

    @The_Assimilator said:

    I'm a firm proponent of overkill.
     

    That reminds me of the time I generated a world in Age of Empires (way back!), built a massive army of plain villagers, and tore right through the map's resources.

    Great fun watching your peons play only one or two wood-chopping animations before an entire forest is stumps, then seeing them carry tons of wood back ot storage.

    It's like a playable ant farm.

    The original AoE? I could never play that game for more than 30 minutes at a time because the godawful pathfinding (or to be more precise, lack thereof) would cause my brain to start bleeding.

    But I have to admit, running a herd of War Elephants or Scythe Chariots through an enemy's base was always great fun... enemy villagers run up to repair a building you're attacking, and die before they even get close. Units that spawn at the same building pretty much die as soon as they're spawned. And then a bajillion enemy priests show up and convert all your units and you ragequit.



  • Hah,  never played AoE seriously, because I'm not a fan of the whole units-and-tech-tree genre. In many ways, my initial tactic was basically that of a tower defense game: find a good spot, build a row of guard towers and walls and keep upgrading them.

    I did enjoy it's smooth graphics, and that campaign where at first all you get is a priest.

     

    It's really quite telling that a friend of mine loves MMORPG and also Fallout3  with its myriad options, items, numbers, upgrades, bonuses, buffs weapons etc etc etc, while I really prefer games with much simpler mechanics, like Half-Life 2, which is nearly explicitly designed ot be used with a single weapon with two modes of operation.

    I do love Fallout3 because to me it's in the sweet area between mmorpg's, which are basically a shell around a baroque statistical engine, and simple FPS's, where skill is learned in a more physcial, fluid way.



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    And then a bajillion enemy priests show up and convert all your units and you ragequit.

     




  • @The_Assimilator said:

    @dhromed said:

    @The_Assimilator said:

    is a smartass who should be shot - with rounds from a GAU-8.
     

    ... more than one?!

     

    O_O

    Granted, there probably won't be very much to shoot at after the first round has impacted, but I'm a firm proponent of overkill. Besides, should you get the opportunity to waste someone with a GAU-8, where's the fun in only firing a single round?

    Use this as your inspiration.


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