• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

over the last few years i've been impressed at how many websites have just stopped working. major businesses, sometimes megacorps. essential functions that simply don't function correctly. basic login, for instance, a thing that worked for literally 20 years, is now broken all over the place.

it's been at least three years, maybe five, since the pizza hut website could remember that I'm logged in, and it does what an awful lot of sites do now: the "hut rewards" link will show my balance, but next to that I get a sign in link, or it'll say "Hello, [name]" but the rewards number is a sign in link. this happens all over the place now, tons of websites will show that i'm logged in and out simultaneously, on the same page. or I'll log in, it'll look fine, then I'll click on "orders" or "profile" and it asks me to log in again. I do so, and then land on a half-broken page where obviously half the elements still think I'm not logged in. amazon does this. ebay. paypal.

digikey's website constantly spits error modals and randomly redirects me back to pages I'm already on. my cart has eight items in it, but I click on it and it shows up empty until i refresh. i've placed three orders in the last month and dozens before that; none appear in My Orders, not a single one. order status links in emails go nowhere.

it's not possible that my account is broken - certainly not accounts on dozens or maybe hundreds of websites. I haven't done anything unusual on any of them, i just signed up like any normal person. it's been happening across a half dozen PCs and installs, different browsers, the works. it's not adblock, I've tried turning it off. happens on my phone too. i think shit is just broken now.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

I’ve experienced this too, eBay will look like I’m signed in but when I try to view my account or orders it asks me to sign in again even though I told it to remember me. Websites for smaller businesses will sometimes be way worse, like Real Milk Paint’s website was completely unusable last time I tried to buy something from them, literally couldn’t even buy anything.

This has happened to me multiple times when trying to log into my PayPal, at complete random across multiple browsers. Just putting me in an endless loop of logging in, proving I'm not a robot, getting logged in to my page, clicking on a function, having to log in, prove I'm not a robot, getting logged in to my page, clicking on a function, having to log in.

I genuinely have no idea what SalesForce is, or what they do, or how they've constructed a gigantic combine citadel in every city in america. However, I suspect the answer is: This

Every single shitty website for every unanswerable corporation with more money than God is like this. When you click the Login button your browser redirects through approximately sixteen different flickering blank pages, each with a different SalesForce URL, before ultimately leaving you on a different website than the one you logged into

There's some truth to this, but it's not limited to Salesforce. There was a sudden burst of new VC funding a few years back into startups selling "one-stop" auth solutions B2B, and so everyone started jumping on board ... and then discovering that actually auth is hard and it's even harder when you've farmed half of it out to a "move fast break things" company that can't even be bothered to document any fucking thing properly, and so now your website is a spaghetti lattice of hacks and work arounds and partial implementations between the original login system, Okta, auth0, and 3 other sites you only will have heard of if you go to the right coke-fueled sales conferences.

Having been forced to involve myself in the implementation of one or two of these messes, every single one failed the basic sniff test of "but why?"

And now here we are: no website on the planet can handle login properly.

for the past few years I've just started assuming that any site I click "remember me" on will remember me for a week tops. My apartment complex insisted on installing electric locks you access with an app and it is constantly logging me out despite me telling it to remember me. It did that shortly after I got a new phone and decided I couldn't log in again until I confirmed I was me via an authenticator on my old phone, which was unfortunately sitting inside the apartment.

It's kind of bleakly funny that this is a thing when the sites that can't/won't remember I'm logged in also absolutely know my IP, which sites I enter and leave from, my zodiac sign, my blood type, where the body is buried, why the ghost can't move on, and whether I've recently googled novelty adult toys.

i feel like the problem is structural in the conway's law meaning

apps like these are made by teams disconnected by organizational structure, time, and incentive

it is inevitable that the applications they produce will mirror this fragmentation

websites, like most products in capitalism, work as well as they need to to support the bottom line at cost. they are not labors of love. the endless many small bugs that do not on their own tank income are left to fester until they become too big to ignore (because they do start having an appreciable impact on conversions or whatever)

i can't say i know a single person who works in software that thinks it generally works as well as it "should". it works as well as it needs to to generate profit over time. if the failure rate isn't so bad that the entire system tanks it ships.

this isn't really anything new (i mean hey, look at most of the consumer electronics on your channel), it's just the industry is getting out of the phase where things are either ironclad juicero-esque masterpieces engineered well beyond their necesssary tolerances or complete flaming garbage into a middle ground where things are kinda garbage, but no so garbage as to fail entirely. that meshes with our own end user ability to recognize common failures more readily, as the everyday experience of using software becomes less magical and more routine

there's probably also an expansion of tooling beyond artisans effect: nobody needs an in-house software department anymore to stand up something reasonably capable, but in turn that means that anyone with a dream of bringing their services into the digital era can despite a complete lack of expertise. idk, it's maybe akin to the proliferation of aliexpress trash electronics that appear from anyone being able to purchase a microcontroller and whatnot off the shelf, package it, and sell it. your modern middle manager has access to ostensibly make their wildest software dreams at least passable, but is deluded into thinking that the professional-ish veneer means that software works as well as its skin looks

webtoons has an issue with rss readers on mobile devices, because of the useragent.

I gave a detailed bug report to their support. They repeatedly asked for irrelevant information and then just told me to clear my cookies.