Just had a taste of the "user error" disease...
Was reading a post on the Eclipse Magazine (no hyperlink here by design, you go and waste your time there, if you really want to - but use Google, I won't be complicit in this endeavour).
Early on, they managed to prove themselves less than proficient in web design with the less than friendly way of accessing the PDF of the magazine and password management; but I put that down to the typical hiccups one encounters early on in deployment / roll-out, and, anyway, managed to get past them.
Today, however, after reading a reasonably informative blog entry, I decided to post a comment - and, being the thoughtful, insightful, informed and well articulated individual that I am, I spend considerably more than the 30 seconds your usual blog-commenter does (being generally of the "well put, mate" or "total rubbish, you loser" variety) to do so.
To avoid bot-posting and spamming, I presume, they have a 'Verify' box, which is the usual kind you see pretty much everywhere these days: you are presented with a picture of letters an asked to type them up in a box and submit.
After going through the process a couple of times and getting nowhere (well, it's early Saturday morning, I thought maybe the caffeine hadn't hit the spot yet) I started to guess it might not be me after all...
I tried every combination: all lowercase, all uppercase, one letter at a time... nope - niet - nada: it just says "Not verified! . Please try again" [punctuation sic]
To make matters worse, they have Javascript that 'disables' the text box, so one cannot even copy & paste the comment for later posterity (or re-use elsewhere) - that's it, you've completely waste your time, dude, and tough luck!
Now, bearing in mind that this is a website dedicated to Eclipse users (so one would assume, somewhat versed in the use of Java and coding in general) that they would be familiar with the concept of 'testing' - but, alas, apparently not.
PS - feel free to post comments here: it's safe, we don't verify and, if we do, it does work.
How do I know? well, I do have comments on my blog (unlike Eclipse Magazine) :-p
