Websites/apps that have driven you insane

[Sebastian Cobb]

We're now paying a subscription fee to allay extremely mild inconvenience?

I just dns-blocked their ad-server... Doesn't work for browsers as they've written scripts to detect it, but it works fine for their connected tv app.

[Vitamin C]

Re: Microsoft Teams. If you want to have a dial-in option for a meeting on there, something that seems to be standard across the board in most meeting software, you have to get involved in this madness (which involves paying for it as well):

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/phone-numbers-for-audio-conferencing-in-teams

[Retinend]

I also hate DuoLingo. It's the epitome of old wine in new bottles: fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises and translation exercises, but digitized.  In my opinion, DuoLingo trains you to think of language as a computer does.

I do think that there is an important place in language learning for gap-fills and translation exercises, but for me they are most effective when they are applied to known areas of difficulty. For example, if you know you have trouble saying a conditional sentence like "if I had known you were struggling I would have said something" in a foreign language, or if you know you are always getting the gender of common nouns wrong.

A better app than DuoLingo - imo - would be LingQ, which is the digital equivalent of a bilingual book. You choose from a library of texts. You read and, as much as necessary (but no more than is necessary), you click on words and phrases to reveal their meaning. You harvest the words you don't yet know and add them to a personalized vocabulary bank. By completing texts, you add them to a bank of texts. It's better to learn language like this, in some kind of context - than in the manner of DuoLingo - without context - because without context you have nonsense. Or, at best, the "pictures with words" that DuoLingo flogs you: "my aunt does not like the new hat" and so on. Phrases that let you toy around with generic verb-object structures in your mind, but which don't add to your store of cultural-linguistic knowledge.

[Endicott]

The main problem I have with Teams is it's too large. Messages can easily get lost, or at least remain unspotted for an embarrassing amount of time. Cobb is right in that even if you have Teams Channels set up for specific purposes, people forget about them and just create chats instead. Cloth is also right, the default listing is not ideal and I don't think it's configurable at all. And whoever mentioned search is right, apart from finding actual people, searching chat is basically impossible.

In those big Channels that inevitably get created, I end up muting them and explaining patiently to people that unless they specifically @ me in a message, I'm not even going to see it.

And I have it easy. Sometimes I get to see other peoples Teams view while they're screen sharing, and I can see the sheer number of outstanding notifications they have. At least I usually manage to keep on top of mine.

What else ... if you don't have a fairly well powered laptop/pc then it crashes easily. Always the sign of a badly written app/program.

[Dex Sawash]

There's a closed forum for General Motors mechanics that is run/hosted by GM. It is absolutely essential to read it to stay on top of field fixes as some people are way ahead of the manufacturer on fixing the piles of shit that GM assembles. The trumpism, everything-phobia and everything-ism is appalling. The moderators are all volunteers who seem to tolerate this stuff. Beyond not offering help to anyone with an abhorrent post history there isn't much I can do about it.

[touchingcloth]

I used gov.uk to update my student loan details earlier. It's one of those sites which does a maddening thing of letting you fill all of the first lines of your address first and asking for your country at the very bottom of the form, but changing your country moves and wipes some of the fields you've just filled in.

[Endicott]

I can just imagine the person who specced it to do that thinking they were being helpful. Classic overthought through UI.

[touchingcloth]

It's very common on websites, and in a way it is helpful because the alternative is presenting UK-centric address fields and people needing to guess which ones best fit the address format for their country, but the better-designed sites will present the country option at the top of the form, or better still won't even show the form at all until you have selected your country first.

[touchingcloth]

Oh, and the billions upon billions of sites which bug you with Captchas or, worse, redirects to fucking Cloudflare authentication pages any time you try browsing on a VPN. I AM NOT A DEFINITELY NOT A ROBOT AND I AM GOING TO SHIT ON YOU WITH MY BIG MANLY ARSE

[Kankurette]

I like Duolingo but some courses are better than others. The French one is extremely pedantic and not always accurate, and your translations do have to be very literal. (And the Spanish course is Latin American, not Castilian.)

Speaking of Spanish, Lily the purple haired goth girl does my head in. Just give her a normal voice like all the other female cartoon characters instead of that horrible whiny drone. She sounds normal on the other courses but not the English or Spanish ones.

[Retinend]

In perfect timing, the polyglot Stuart Jay Raj released this video on the difficulties with trusting apps with your language learning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WqVH2jQF7A
Stop Expecting Apps to Teach you a Language
261 views Premiered 17 hours ago

[dissolute ocelot]

I like Duolingo but some courses are better than others. The French one is extremely pedantic and not always accurate, and your translations do have to be very literal. (And the Spanish course is Latin American, not Castilian.)

There's so much variation between courses. The Italian drills you on about 15 tenses, even the past conditional and other really obscure ones, while other languages just seem to give you the basics of grammar and lots of colloquial and conversational stuff. There's no consistency between languages on what they teach you. I'm guessing they pay one person to write the whole thing and then rely on users doing the lessons to report errors and improve it - when you get to the later part of courses there's often total garbage because not many people have got that far and reported the errors.

Some languages have speech recognition which is terrible. I don't know if it's my phone, but often it won't pick up anything I say, or it decides I've spoken a 15-word sentence after about a second and marks me totally wrong.

[Gurke and Hare]

It's very common on websites, and in a way it is helpful because the alternative is presenting UK-centric address fields and people needing to guess which ones best fit the address format for their country, but the better-designed sites will present the country option at the top of the form, or better still won't even show the form at all until you have selected your country first.

There's no need to have different address fields for different countries at all - simply have address line 1, address line 2, address line 3 and so on. While standard address formats exist, there are always going to be outliers and websites shouldn't be assuming they know more about the user's address than the user does. This is how we get the abomination of mandatory County fields.

[Blue Jam]

Some languages have speech recognition which is terrible. I don't know if it's my phone, but often it won't pick up anything I say, or it decides I've spoken a 15-word sentence after about a second and marks me totally wrong.

I had a similar problem when I tried Flowkey for (electric) piano. It just wouldn't pick up any notes I played unless I played really loudly, and I just didn't want to inflict my slow and n00bish playing on my neighbours. Nope, back to headphones so only I suffer.

[touchingcloth]

There's no need to have different address fields for different countries at all - simply have address line 1, address line 2, address line 3 and so on. While standard address formats exist, there are always going to be outliers and websites shouldn't be assuming they know more about the user's address than the user does. This is how we get the abomination of mandatory County fields.

The issue there is if the web form shows you fields like:

• Line 1
• Line 2
• Line 3
• Line 4
• Line 5
• Line 6

...then that's only really going to be useful for the first line, and if you get people signing up from different towns in the same country or from different countries then chances are that a lot of the lower down fields will have completely different fields in. Demographics come into it as well, as older generations will be in the habit of still adding a county before the postcode.

The best alternatives for avoiding that while still having a single form would be to have fields named things like "County/State" and "Post/Zip Code", but then you get the issue that not all fields are strictly required for the postal system in all countries, so per-country forms are the best way of keeping your data as clean as possible.

[Blue Jam]

Those "look up address" things are also not much use if you live in Edinburgh or Glasgow and they don't recognise the system of tenement flat addresses. "Flat 3F2" might seem odd to someone in London but to a postal worker it says "Deliver this to the second flat on the third floor". It actually makes more sense.

They're especially frustrating if you live in The City of Edinburgh and the system insists you actually live in Midlothian. It's probably the same in North East Wales, with the whole Clwyd/Wrexham/Flintshire/Denbighshire thing.

[touchingcloth]

Absolutely rage-inducing when a website tells you that your postal or email address is invalid, when you know for a fact that it's just that their system has been poorly-designed and only recognises a narrow range of things as being valid.

[greencalx]

The insistence of suppling a county when you don't live in one is quite annoying. The closest thing is the council area, which means you'd end up putting "Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh" but often you're forced to put the registration county of Midlothian. Sometimes I just put Scotland in that space. Or Lancashire[nb]This is due to a historical accident where, for some reason, a credit card that I took out whilst living in Manchester decided that I lived in "Manchester, Lancashire, Lancashire, Lancashire" (so good they named it thrice), this despite Manchester similarly not being in Lancashire. I assumed this would get fixed when I moved to Edinburgh, at which point my address became, "Edinburgh, Midlothian, Lancashire, Lancashire".[/nb].

[greencalx]

Those "look up address" things are also not much use if you live in Edinburgh or Glasgow and they don't recognise the system of tenement flat addresses. "Flat 3F2" might seem odd to someone in London but to a postal worker it says "Deliver this to the second flat on the third floor". It actually makes more sense.

I agree that the xFy flat identification system has some practical advantages (although I'm never sure if "left" and "right" is from the perspective of the street or the stair) but the official Post Office[nb]a tautology, I guess[/nb] address system has strictly numerical flat numbers[nb]another one[/nb] so this is probably why most places insist on it.

If you get to see the title deeds they'll say something crazy like "The westermost third of the second landing in the building to be erected 400 yards northeast of the crossroads by the most southerly farm in Lord Millar's estate" most of which no longer exists.

[Gurke and Hare]

The issue there is if the web form shows you fields like:

• Line 1
• Line 2
• Line 3
• Line 4
• Line 5
• Line 6

...then that's only really going to be useful for the first line, and if you get people signing up from different towns in the same country or from different countries then chances are that a lot of the lower down fields will have completely different fields in. Demographics come into it as well, as older generations will be in the habit of still adding a county before the postcode.

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean here. Should that second "fields" actually be a different word. And what does it actually matter if someone puts a superfluous county in there, it isn't going to stop anything being delivered is it?

The best alternatives for avoiding that while still having a single form would be to have fields named things like "County/State" and "Post/Zip Code", but then you get the issue that not all fields are strictly required for the postal system in all countries, so per-country forms are the best way of keeping your data as clean as possible.

Clean for what?  People know what their address is better than the person designing the web form, don't try and force them to jam it into a format that may not be appropriate.

[robhug]

These should all be sent to Dave Gorman who Im sure could get a show commissioned on Dave

[touchingcloth]

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean here. Should that second "fields" actually be a different word. And what does it actually matter if someone puts a superfluous county in there, it isn't going to stop anything being delivered is it?

It depends on the system. No, it wouldn't break anything based on actually getting stuff delivered, but that data is rarely used exclusively for the purposes of sending physical mail, so it would knacker anything automated you needed to do with the it. You wouldn't be able to accurately say how many people in the database lived in Derbyshire, say, or if you were trying to prepare a mass email for everyone who lived in Manchester then it would get complicated if not impossible.

[Gurke and Hare]

It depends on the system. No, it wouldn't break anything based on actually getting stuff delivered, but that data is rarely used exclusively for the purposes of sending physical mail, so it would knacker anything automated you needed to do with the it. You wouldn't be able to accurately say how many people in the database lived in Derbyshire, say, or if you were trying to prepare a mass email for everyone who lived in Manchester then it would get complicated if not impossible.

How many people live in Derbyshire? A couple of posts ago you were worrying about people putting the county in their address, now you want to select by it? Why not just use the postcode for stuff like that, it will be much more reliable.

[touchingcloth]

How many people live in Derbyshire? A couple of posts ago you were worrying about people putting the county in their address, now you want to select by it? Why not just use the postcode for stuff like that, it will be much more reliable.

People who live in Derbyshire was just one example, but the problem stands whichever way you cut it. If you have 6 address fields and there's no guaranteeing which part of their address people are going to add into which box, with the exception of maybe the first line, then you won't be able to reliably segment the data using any of them.

[Kankurette]

There's so much variation between courses. The Italian drills you on about 15 tenses, even the past conditional and other really obscure ones, while other languages just seem to give you the basics of grammar and lots of colloquial and conversational stuff. There's no consistency between languages on what they teach you. I'm guessing they pay one person to write the whole thing and then rely on users doing the lessons to report errors and improve it - when you get to the later part of courses there's often total garbage because not many people have got that far and reported the errors.

Some languages have speech recognition which is terrible. I don't know if it's my phone, but often it won't pick up anything I say, or it decides I've spoken a 15-word sentence after about a second and marks me totally wrong.

The Scottish Gaelic course is interesting - it was one bloke and his family doing all the voices, rather than a computerised voice. He got his uncles and aunts, wee cousins etc. doing it. German and Welsh were good, although the German expressions on Duolingo aren't ones I was taught in school. I already speak German, I just do Duolingo to refresh basics (same with Spanish and French). Norwegian has a decent tip section. I've decided not to use it for non-Roman alphabets for reasons others have stated. Doing Russian was a ballache. Latin was annoyingly short.

I turned off voice recognition because it pissed me off. The computer didn't understand my accent.

[Gurke and Hare]

People who live in Derbyshire was just one example, but the problem stands whichever way you cut it. If you have 6 address fields and there's no guaranteeing which part of their address people are going to add into which box, with the exception of maybe the first line, then you won't be able to reliably segment the data using any of them.

There's no guaranteeing it just because you put labels on the address fields either. Some valid addresses have more than one street name in them. Some valid addresses have a district within a town/city in them. Some have a building name in them. Whatever label you put on the fields, you can't be sure that the user will have an address that matches the pattern, and what they'll put in what field if they don't. So as I say, use the postcoide to segment address data, it's pretty much designed to allow you to do that to the level of granularity you want. And given that this thread is essentially about websites being easy for people to use, don't delete data they've already entered, and don't place how easy it is for you to send marketing to them over ease of use.

[Ambient Sheep]

...some people are way ahead of the manufacturer on fixing the piles of shit that GM assembles.

This is probably hideously-old news to you, but just in case (and for anyone else), watch this amazing 32 second video on how to "hotwire" a Mark 1 Vauxhall Nova SRi (Opel Corsa SR to you :-) ).

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,87771.msg4594766.html#msg4594766

According to the comments it works on any GM of that vintage that has the same button.

[Dex Sawash]

This is probably hideously-old news to you, but just in case (and for anyone else), watch this amazing 32 second video on how to "hotwire" a Mark 1 Vauxhall Nova SRi (Opel Corsa SR to you :-) ).

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,87771.msg4594766.html#msg4594766

According to the comments it works on any GM of that vintage that has the same button.

That's great, don't think there is a North American version of that car (maybe Mexico). We did have the rear drive Chevette up to 1986.

When I went to corporate training they would have 'bugged' cars to repair at the end of modules. One was a car that wouldn't turn off if you had your foot on the brake when you pulled the key out. The bug was that a blown fuse was subbed in AND a dual filament brake/tail bulb with a short between the 2 filaments was installed.
The voltage from the brake lamp backfed the switched circuit for the park lamps and somehow this backfed the fuel system relay pull down coil so it wouldn't turn off. You had to find both problems and follow a proper strategy to solve them to get full credit for the fix.

I would guess that hazard switch hack backfeeds the main relay so the car car is live but you have to push start it.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Hah, my dad had a diesel Montego estate with a sticky fuel cutoff valve so you could kill the ignition and electrics but the engine would still be chugging away meaning you had to stall it or tap the valve with a hammer.

[dissolute ocelot]

There's no guaranteeing it just because you put labels on the address fields either. Some valid addresses have more than one street name in them. Some valid addresses have a district within a town/city in them. Some have a building name in them. Whatever label you put on the fields, you can't be sure that the user will have an address that matches the pattern, and what they'll put in what field if they don't. So as I say, use the postcoide to segment address data, it's pretty much designed to allow you to do that to the level of granularity you want. And given that this thread is essentially about websites being easy for people to use, don't delete data they've already entered, and don't place how easy it is for you to send marketing to them over ease of use.

As well as addresses, there's quite a bit been done in recent years in understanding the variability in people's names, because you can't just design a form with "forename, surname". It's all so complicated.

Maybe some day the fascist postal authorities will force us all to have purely numerical addresses, mail sent to our state ID number at address number, and then nobody will know where anybody lives (I know people who can tell you every post-code two-letter abbreviation, and I'm sure there are Americans who know most ZIP codes, so we need to make it harder).