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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 09:51 am

Yeah, it's just a fail-y day today.

If you go to sign up for GTE Federal Credit Union online, you will find that the first thing it does is have you create a site login.  Then it goes on to the actual application form.  Currently, you can't get past the first page, because (here comes fail #1) the "Job Title" field is a text field, but the page verification logic thinks it's a drop-down list, and will reject the page forever because you haven't selected a job title from the drop-down list.  Which you can't, because it doesn't exist.

So, suppose you think they'll surely notice an error like that and fix it soon, and you decide to come back in a couple of days and try it again.  Well, the next thing you discover is that when you come back, you now need to create a new login identity.  Because, even though the site failed and wouldn't let you complete the application, it saved your login data.  So the login identity you created has been consumed (fail #2).¹

"Well," you figure, "maybe I can log in with that ID and resume or retry my application."  Nope. That produces a site error.  In fact, customer service confirms that there is no way to log in with that identity and resume or restart your application.  (Fail #3.)  But the identity will expire after ... some time.  They don't know how long.

I really wonder sometimes at the stupidities committed by supposedly professional web application designers.  If online shopping worked this badly, online vendors would charge your credit card before determining whether the item you wanted was actually in stock or even available.

[1]  A malicious individual could probably figure out a way to use this as a denial of service, by robotically completing just that first page with throwaway data and consuming all available user identities, since nothing on the first page except for the username is verified to be valid or unique.  Fail #4.

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Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 06:08 pm (UTC)
A malicious individual could probably figure out a way to use this as a denial of service

Sounds like something fun to do on a weekend. While it is possible that, in response to such a thing (aside from any legal issues), it might prompt the designers to "fix" the problem, judging by the utter fail thus far, instead, they would further engineer the limitation to their online applications.

One of those time where it would be good to have the president's email, and politely ask them if they have tried to create an account online with their own website lately...