A warm reboot works wonders

[owl]

I'm a software engineer for a large institution, and whenever the corporate tech support guys have a ticket with one of the apps my team do production support on, it generally gets assigned to us in case it's an outage or a bug.

Ticket: [Foo] is reporting that the [bar] program is not recognizing her e-mail address. Sometimes it takes her e-mail, sometimes it doesn't.
Giving an error: "The e-mail address you have entered is not in the correct format"

Aha, I say. I know that error message. There is a bit of JavaScript on the frontend that validates whether the user has input something of the format "foo@bar.com" in the email field and doesn't let her submit the form until she gets it right.

Grinning slightly, I reply with a bowdlerised version of "Repo steps plz? Also, screenshot or it didn't happen."

Update to ticket: I shut the PC down and re-started it. And now it's working, disregard this ticket.

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

"Repo steps plz? Also, screenshot or it didn't happen."

Heh. Wouldn't it sometimes be nice if we could word things like that.

There is a bit of JavaScript on the frontend that validates whether the user has input something of the format "foo@bar.com" in the email field and doesn't let her submit the form until she gets it right.

And that reminds me of the many, many email address validators that are simply wrong.

The most obvious is when they only allow "com net org, or two letters" for top-level domains and fall on their face when presented with .museum or .info, but others will also only allow [a-z0-9._-]+ or the like and not accept addresses with other punctuation such as "+".

And then you have IDN; I presume people will have to learn the Punycode version of their domain for restrictive checkers.

[owl]

*checks*

It allows any string after the dot, but no exotic punctuation. It's not really necessary, though, as it's an inhouse system so any email is going to be forename.surname@myemployersdomain.com anyway.

Users are so, so bad at bug reports. All they tell you is what happened, or a vague approximation thereof, rarely what they expected to happen and hardly ever what they did to get there. Or they say something like "it's broken". Thanks, that's useful.

Of course, that would be because the ticket system sort of sucks, and is the clearinghouse for everything from "I need to build a new server cluster" to "I can't log in".

[pne.livejournal.com]

It's not really necessary, though, as it's an inhouse system

Yes, that's what I thought it would be. So my rant wasn't specifically directed at that code but against similar code in general, which *does* have to accept arbitrary email addresses.

[jimbojones.livejournal.com]

Update to ticket: HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS