I got a good laugh out of this for a few seconds before getting actually frustrated with it.
Mostly because my bank does a lot of these terrible things.
I scrolled down and still couldn't see the checkboxes under the last row. Maybe it also doesn't work on Firefox, because as trivial as it is to make a site that works everywhere no one does. Normally this frustrates me, but if that's the case here it kind of makes sense.
I did exactly that as well. I’m also happy that there appear to be several different captchas, as others mentioned ones I didn’t see. The best one I clicked through was “select every picture with glasses” and every picture had either eyeglasses, drinking glasses or panes of glass.
Mine was "select all checks" and had plaid cloth, chess kings in trouble, checkmarks, x marks, bank checks, etc...
The one that almost got me was the popup with the timer that said "hurry up" but instead of a "go away" box it had a "full screen" box. I don't know how you are supposed to get rid of that box, I had to inspect element->delete node to get past it.
I did manage to finish in a little over 5 minutes.
I initially tried selecting all of the boxes, and noticed the bottom row didn't have any boxes. So I scrolled up, saw some more checkboxes, and selected those. It worked.
Seriously? There's tons of stuff missing, at the very least a cookie banner ("we value your privacy not") and "aw, snap, we're having probs to bla blah blah" and social media icons. Also, it's known that call-to-actions must come in a group of three, and have cute vectors. See [1] on how to do a website.
Yet the site of the people who made this (Bagaar) does not have a privacy banner but happily contacts Google Analytics, DoubleClick, HotJar and HubSpot.
Two that made me laugh and think were on the last page:
Choose images that contain a bow, where the images were of bows (archery), bows (ties), bows (hair ties), and bows (gesture).
But then they really got me with the checkboxes for those images. You think they're beneath the images, but they're actually above and the frame was just scrolled down. You don't realize until you get to the bottom row and don't see any checkboxes
> But then they really got me with the checkboxes for those images. You think they're beneath the images, but they're actually above and the frame was just scrolled down.
I saw that immediately, but it still got me, because I tried to scroll down, thinking the checkboxes were beneath.
Instagram does something similar if it detects that you are on mobile. A huge banner advertising their app is displayed, and the [x] in the top right corner is almost impossible to hit.
Every developer should be required to use this site daily for a month, before they can graduate. Simply using it once isn't enough ring home what you'll put your users through
I rather miss those early days. Web 1.0 is looked down on for its visual clutter (and definitely the hatred of image backgrounds and animated text was well-deserved), but Web 2.0 has just as much if not more clutter, and of a darker nature.
The current web isn't anything like Web 2.0. Web 2.0 never happened, except in tiny isolated pockets. It's a terrible name anyway - it indicates a natural progression (which never happened), a clear improvement (which didn't materialize quickly enough for anyone important to care) and incompatibility with the past (which was never necessary since semantic components can be embedded in a normal web site). We're currently at Web √(-2) alpha-Google-2-Facebook-4-patched-0af33cd.
It boggles the mind to think of how much resources (time and money) have been spent so that control freak corporations can control my user experience from the server when I have a rich client under my control.
The whole web is backwards these days; users should’ve able to download themes for different kinds of content and the content itself should be barely human readable self-describing text with no layout instructions, only hints (like title and h1 and p)- leave it to the client to choose how to display.
I think it's extremely important that the text going around on the web be human readable and notepad editable. It really lowers the bar to start creating content rather than just consuming it.
Obviously it's a minority that do, but the potential itself has value I think.
So, I'm younger, but there was absolutely a shift in thinking from web 1.0 to 2.0 in that 2006-2008 era. You could even call it the Ajaxian era. http://ajaxian.com/
I read that blog every day and the techniques and tooling (jquery/mootools/etc) absolutely shifted the thinking that birthed our "modern" react/vue style single page app.
This is like saying that Classical -> Baroque never happened because people still paint in a Classical style.
No, what happened was that a lot of people said "web 2.0!", a bunch of other people said "AJAX!", and only the AJAX thing actually happened. Web 2.0 meant the semantic web, not the asynchronously loaded web.
For as far as i remember 'web 2.0' meant replicating Mac OS X's Aqua on the web (very poorly, of course) with gradients and shadows (not necessarily through CSS, thanks to IE6, but it helped) and unnecessary javascript everywhere.
My favourite sites are Hacker News, and similarly reddit with the old design and custom themes turned off. Functional, clean, content focused, and high - but not too high - information density. There are changes I would make to both, but there are reasons I got addicted to them.
Ugh, I thought there were a few in there to trick me. Like on the "check" one, there was a pen hovering over a checkbox but it was unchecked, so I didn't think that counted...
I about fell off my chair laughing with how slow closing the "how can we help" popover was. If I had to write a backstory for this I'd say some dev was really proud of animating that and wanted to make sure everyone noticed it.
Right? Every new web developer that first learns how to do animations REALLY over does them.
It's like how elementary school kids write their "papers" in comic sans (and eight other fonts half-way through) and each word is a different color. Or they make a power point and every-single-dang-thing just HAS to spin into the slide.
> like how elementary school kids write their "papers" in comic sans (and eight other fonts half-way through) and each word is a different color
HA! I did that! I thought it made the essay more interesting to read, and it was a pain in the ass since I had to transfer the text by hand (ie rewrite it) in Deluxepaint on my Amiga 500, then print on our 9-needle matrix printer. Oh, how I miss the sound of that. Or do I?
Naturally, I was told by my teacher to never do it again.
I wonder how much of this is related to how we teach kids initially -- everything is primary colours; schools value appearance of writing above content ('it's so neat'); it's all about big gestures, no subtlety; ...?
Oh god I’ve had this happen before. At my first job our CEO was so proud of the splash screen she designed that she asked me to slow down the apps loading time by three seconds.
An underappreciated portion of this section is "expand to full screen," which expands the white space to full screen but keeps the TOS frame the same size!
Some time ago I tried registering an account on a site where the password policy was that you couldn't use special characters and that it would discard any characters you entered after the first 15 ones.
But you know what the worst part was?
They never bothered informing you about these limitations. The site just returned a generic error.
Not supporting special characters I can kinda understand but silently discarding characters from the password the user has picked is just evil. It took me LOTS of registration attempts and password resets before I figured out what the hell was going on.
> Not supporting special characters I can kinda understand
IIRC this is mostly done to prevent SQL injection attacks. In a modern system there is 0 reason not to allow any characters in the password (within whatever encoding you support).
I registered an account for some software company that was acquiring some other services, so the left hand wasn't talking to the right.
Sure enough, different parts of the site had different password requirements, and they enforced them on password change. So you could create an account on a sub-site that wasn't accepted on the main site, which was the only site with the password change page, but you couldn't enter the old password to fix it.
I think password reset did work, but I wound up creating another password that worked in one place but not another...
I once registered a password using a special character, but I could not get in. It turned out that they url encoded it, if I used %21 instead of "!" I could get into the site.
The discover card (As in discover credit cards) had a limitation of 15 characters for the password back when I first signed up for one out of college. Even back then I was using long complicated passwords. The "clever" thing is that they never told you about this. They just truncated it at 15 characters on both the sign up page and the login page. I didn't realize this for several years because their password entry field was so small.
Honest question: Where do people think those cookie banners come from?
Because, they aren't a dark pattern. They aren't a sneaky way to try to juice your engagement numbers. They didn't show up everywhere because growth hackers started getting jealous of the other guy's cookie banner. They are literally required by law, or at least many lawyers interpret the law in that way. The designers at my work really didn't want to make one, and especially didn't want it added to our site.
Cookie banners are only really required if you're doing things like using them for "personalizing ads" and the like. If your cookies just there to check if you're logged in and other essential functions, you don't need a banner.
Please tell that to my Communications department. If they believe you, I'll owe you lots of beers.
I'd guess the thinking is "Well, I don't really understand those requirements and it's hard to be sure if we meet them, safest just to put the banner on." And "Well, if we don't need it, how come all these OTHER sites have it? You really think they're all wrong and you're right? What, are you a fancy pants lawyer now?"
"Cover your ass" is the main driving force of most of America.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 81.0 ms ] threadIf you manage to actually 'sign up' it tells you are a legend and rewards you with a Dancing Carlton gif[0].
[0] - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/carlton-banks-dance/
I tried scrolling down, realized I couldn't, then scrolled up to find the unfilled row at the top...
There are pictures of people checking things – a watch, and something else I can't quite see.
There are games of chess in a state of check.
There are monetary checks.
There are check boxes.
The one that almost got me was the popup with the timer that said "hurry up" but instead of a "go away" box it had a "full screen" box. I don't know how you are supposed to get rid of that box, I had to inspect element->delete node to get past it.
I did manage to finish in a little over 5 minutes.
The bottom-left corner of the box says something like "©lose 2019." If you click it, it closes.
The word HERE is a link, with styling and cursor set to look like normal text.
(Also, clarification: This was my first try.)
I was at 7min, the last part got me. My thoughts were.. Ok, it probably just means light, so I check a few. Fails. Let me try again... Nope.
Five minutes later... what if it's all. No, it can't be that dumb. Bingo. Wow. It was that dumb.
no
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/9pmqxb/typical_...
1. Checkboxes ambiguously located.
2. Poor instructions in captchas.
3. Text field suggestions that persist when you click on the field.
4. Pointless validation on inputs
...
"Oh, it didn't mean whole email, just the first part"
"Hmm tab doesn't work"
"Oh, it didn't mean whole domain, just the first part"
"Where's .com, oh I see"
"Wait 'Next' isn't the big blue button?"
"Oh I see, that big red message means my password is good."
The 'How can we help' arrow just makes it grow slightly taller. Over and over. Heh heh heh.
And that was just the first page! This is fun, had me genuinely chuckling quite a lot.
Choose images that contain a bow, where the images were of bows (archery), bows (ties), bows (hair ties), and bows (gesture).
But then they really got me with the checkboxes for those images. You think they're beneath the images, but they're actually above and the frame was just scrolled down. You don't realize until you get to the bottom row and don't see any checkboxes
I saw that immediately, but it still got me, because I tried to scroll down, thinking the checkboxes were beneath.
I loathe it so much I stopped using it entirely and just book marked my favourite podcasts like a filthy savage.
1) Require adblock
2) Banner saying the website doesn't use cookies, which goes away if you mouseover
3) If you're on mobile, show a banner saying the website doesn't have an app
4) A signup form, but when you try to focus it, it turns into a banner saying "jk this website doesn't have signup"
1) Not complain about adblock (ie. silently allow it instead of moaning).
2) Simply don't use cookies.
3) Don't mention app (which is often just an Electron frontend anyway) in any way.
4) Allow the website to be used without signing up.
These 4 examples used to be the default back in the early days of the WWW.
I have a daily need for both tags.
The whole web is backwards these days; users should’ve able to download themes for different kinds of content and the content itself should be barely human readable self-describing text with no layout instructions, only hints (like title and h1 and p)- leave it to the client to choose how to display.
Obviously it's a minority that do, but the potential itself has value I think.
I read that blog every day and the techniques and tooling (jquery/mootools/etc) absolutely shifted the thinking that birthed our "modern" react/vue style single page app.
This is like saying that Classical -> Baroque never happened because people still paint in a Classical style.
otherwise:
5) works better with Javascript disabled
6) works better in Firefox than Chrome
7) doesn't work if it can read your referer
Ironically, I find there's (broadly) two sorts of JS-enabled website:
- completely broken without (often just a blank canvas) - works better without than with
The most entertaining 'works better' example I've had is a site that gave me a free upgrade, because I was blocking client-side price manipulation.
Google Maps however: block canvas fingerprinting, and it's Goodbye CPU!
I sign up only once, yet every website makes it hard to find the login dialog which I use way more often.
Maybe I need to drink a verification can to help it along
It's like how elementary school kids write their "papers" in comic sans (and eight other fonts half-way through) and each word is a different color. Or they make a power point and every-single-dang-thing just HAS to spin into the slide.
HA! I did that! I thought it made the essay more interesting to read, and it was a pain in the ass since I had to transfer the text by hand (ie rewrite it) in Deluxepaint on my Amiga 500, then print on our 9-needle matrix printer. Oh, how I miss the sound of that. Or do I?
Naturally, I was told by my teacher to never do it again.
Edit: I think I found the approx model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_vXA058EDY
But you know what the worst part was?
They never bothered informing you about these limitations. The site just returned a generic error.
Not supporting special characters I can kinda understand but silently discarding characters from the password the user has picked is just evil. It took me LOTS of registration attempts and password resets before I figured out what the hell was going on.
IIRC this is mostly done to prevent SQL injection attacks. In a modern system there is 0 reason not to allow any characters in the password (within whatever encoding you support).
Sure enough, different parts of the site had different password requirements, and they enforced them on password change. So you could create an account on a sub-site that wasn't accepted on the main site, which was the only site with the password change page, but you couldn't enter the old password to fix it.
I think password reset did work, but I wound up creating another password that worked in one place but not another...
I saw a screenshot of an error dialogue on Reddit once (so possibly fake, but still hilarious) that said something like:
"You cannot use that password, because it's already in use by user Kegstand360"
Because, they aren't a dark pattern. They aren't a sneaky way to try to juice your engagement numbers. They didn't show up everywhere because growth hackers started getting jealous of the other guy's cookie banner. They are literally required by law, or at least many lawyers interpret the law in that way. The designers at my work really didn't want to make one, and especially didn't want it added to our site.
Nobody likes them. They came from lawyers.
I'd guess the thinking is "Well, I don't really understand those requirements and it's hard to be sure if we meet them, safest just to put the banner on." And "Well, if we don't need it, how come all these OTHER sites have it? You really think they're all wrong and you're right? What, are you a fancy pants lawyer now?"
"Cover your ass" is the main driving force of most of America.
I hate you.
>Gender and Title don’t match