Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

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Why I hate Radio Userland

Radio Userland is one of the larger weblogs on the net. Why do they suck? One simple reason. If you forget (or don’t want) to fill in one of the comment form sections, such as your email address, when you submit the form it erases all of your work, and then tells you that it requires an email address. The form doesn’t even tell you all the fields are required before you begin, and then to throw away all your work is unforgivable. If I met the developer that created the comment form I’d give him a vicious wedgie.

Published Feb 27 2004, 12:43 PM by darrell

Comments

tomrowton said:

I think a wedgie might be a bit lenient. There's no excuse this far into the internet's life for this sort of thing. They're actually going to the trouble of authenticating the fields, they are saving them in the database, dollars to doughnuts says they have a "remember me" type functionality that uses a cookie to store information, so what is so hard about persisting a failed data submission?

I can't even count the number of times I've felt moved enough to spend 10, 15, 20 minutes responding to something only to have my work lost. I promptly leave such sites, never to return again. At one point, I used to put them in my HOSTS file if they managed to piss me off more than once.

I'm all for being a "lazy programmer" - I come from the land of perl - but there's lazy and there's inept. Reminds me of a recent tirade about open source software not being ready for primetime in response to an attempt to install a network print queue - I think it was Eric Raymond, but I could be wrong.

# February 27, 2004 8:34 AM

Darrell said:

Yeah, I was at a loss for words after that happened. I've been doing web development since 1998, and I haven't done something like that since, oh, 1998!

# February 27, 2004 8:38 AM

James Avery said:

No!! You can't say that! Everything Dave does is golden and perfect! :)

-James

# February 27, 2004 10:41 AM

Darrell said:

James - hehehe.

# February 27, 2004 1:04 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

my showstopper is different but related: no comment count/display in SharpReader. With .Text blogs, you simply expand a post to see the comments. With Radio, I just forget to check. It's too much trouble. If I wanted to do all that I would just use a browser.

# February 27, 2004 6:36 PM

Jason Haley said:

We use to have that same sort of problem with our interior change tracking system...we had to fill the form out for every change we needed moved to production. If you forgot something and had to go back -> you got to type it all over! Funny how keeping state is a nice to have and not a requirement.

# February 28, 2004 1:50 AM

Darrell said:

Shannon - I agree, the feedback count with .TEXT blogs is very handy. I just wish that someone would come out with an aggregator that would alert me when a post that I commented on had additional comments...

# February 28, 2004 2:59 AM

Darrell said:

Jason - no kidding. Usability is often placed on the back burner requirements-wise. As a developer you do your best, but if usability takes time (like when does that every happen? :) the project manager shoots it down.

# February 28, 2004 3:00 AM