(no subject)

[dr_tectonic]

Okay, anybody who builds support websites (which isn't anybody reading this, I don't think; I'm talking code structure rather than look-and-feel): if you have, on your website, a little popup kind of thing that says, basically, "please write us a short essay telling us how we can better serve you", with a place for the user to enter contact info so they can get a response, and if the user clicks "send" but there's something wrong so you have to change the popup to say "sorry, you need to pick a category for this question", and you DON'T copy the information from the textbox into the new popup, so that the little mini-essay the user wrote explaining the problem is now completely lost?

Then please set your own head on fire, so that I don't have to do it for you.

Because I am running out of matches.

Comments

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Well, y'know. Sometimes ya just gotta bitch about things.

[dpolicar]

is it OK if I add a button to the "sorry, you need to pick a category for this question" popup that reads "Set my head on fire for not copying your text into this popup"?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

As long as it actually sets the programmer's head on fire, yes.

[dpolicar]

well, of course. otherwise it would be fraudulent.

[navrins]

Sites like that are broken so often that I try to just make it a habit to do ctrl-A ctrl-C before clicking submit on any of them, lest they do just that.

I usually forget, but I try.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Amen, Brother!

It's numbskull design like that that taught me to always copy such text to a local file before submitting, just in case.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I'm with navrins -- I try to remember to do that, but usually forget...

Y'know, I bet somebody's made a firefox extension to solve this problem. And if nobody has, somebody should.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Hm. Excellent point on the firefox. That hadn't ocurred to me.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Likewise, I've tried to internalize using ctrl-a ctrl-c on forms, but an extension would certainly be helpful too.

It looks like scribe is part-way there. It'll save a form's data (with a suggested filename) when you hit ctrl-s. One less character, yay. :)

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

Doesn't the back button do this for you? I mean, right-click, choose back. That's how firefox works in windows, anyway. Submit, see error, click back, and the text is there ready to be re-submitted.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

It's a javascript popup. No back button, and no "back" in the context menu because it's not going to an error page, it's changing the popup contents.

Fuckers.

(And yet another reason to loathe javascript and popups.)

[detailbear.livejournal.com]

No good ever comes from pop-ups.

In the past, I've ranted that no good programmer would use pop-ups, but maybe that's being a bit too harsh. They should have their own special icon, though, (maybe a jack-in-the-box?) that would allow you to control when they popped up on a page.