vogon

the evil "Website Boy"

member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist

zip's bf

no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good


twitter (inactive)
twitter.com/vogon
bluesky
if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
irl
seattle, WA

when we were starting assc I drastically overestimated how quickly our revenue would grow and also drastically overestimated how much of it would be subject to sales tax, so we got dropped into the "monthly" reporting window bucket for sales tax by the washington state government, which is fine

what's less fine is the login flow for the state department of revenue web site, which goes

  1. enter your username and password
  2. get a 2fa code in your e-mail
  3. copy the code out of the e-mail and into the login form

normal so far

  1. get a 500 that says "the Department of Revenue web site has encountered an error. please log in again."

okay fine I can't say that I'm running a web site where this never happens, sure

  1. enter your username and password
  2. get a popup error that says "Session has timed out. Please log in again."

what the hell

  1. enter your username and password
  2. get another 2fa code in your e-mail
  3. copy the code out of the e-mail and into the login form
  4. ask the site to remember this device since it's the only device you ever log in from and maybe you can avoid 4 steps of this process at least
  5. it asks you for a device name
  6. you enter the name of the computer you're on
  7. "this device name is already registered"

...

  1. you enter some random string
  2. "there was an error saving this device"

. . .

  1. give up and resign yourself to going through this whole process every month for the rest of your career

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in reply to @vogon's post:

you could use keepass or similar. keepass has an autotype feature that works with most forms... also very convenient if you want to use ridiculously long passwords

I go through a similar process every time I need to login to any portion of my college’s many many many systems. To get my class roster, I have to login, it tells me some garbage, I have to then change the URL back to go to the website where I am already logged in, then click a hundred things just to get my roster of students. Crumbling nightmare.

it's extremely cool that there has never been an official government or corporate process created for the express purpose of making sure someone, somewhere, delivers money they're legally supposed to that is any good at making that very specific thing easy to do

The IRS makes it very easy to give them money. It's a little harder to make sure they know exactly what that money is for, but giving it to them? Very easy.