azurelunatic | TITS, TITS I SAY

DEAR SWEET GODS, WHEN YOU IMPLEMENT --

okay, backing up here.

First, let me say that the devs I am speaking of here are strictly internal, and in no way work on production software that is customer-facing. I am the user of the system I am currently speaking of, and BOY HOWDY DO I HAVE FEELINGS.

The system holds information about the people we do research with. In theory, any researcher in my department is the user. In actuality, the researchers dump the data upon me, and I enter it. I am the user.

There are many specialized fields. There is a general "notes" field. Things like the link to whatever thing that has the link go there. I asked if the devs could autolinkify.

Devs said sure.

Their method of doing this was to bolt on a Rich Text Editor.

People who have known me for some time may be familiar with "tits against the RTE". This is what happens when user support and the director of development love each other very much, and maybe engage in the sort of bonding chatter that makes everyone glad that HR is not around to hear it. And maybe there are cleavage pictures and the promise of more if only dev will tear out the RTE that has been causing so very much grief for user support because THE FUCKER JUST NEVER WORKS. Right, or otherwise.

I am, therefore, deeply suspicious of any and all rich text editors. Thus it was that I noticed that yes, adding a link did work correctly -- and then I loaded the edit page again, to see. (After noticing that having expanded the bit where you enter the address, the form was too large to fit into the window, there was no scroll bar, and the 'save' and 'cancel' buttons were fuckwaydown at the bottom, and filing a bug for *that*.)

THE NOTES FIELD WAS BLANK WHEN I LOADED THE MOTHERFUCKER. O CHILDREN OF THE COMPILER, WHEN YOU HAVE A USER-EDITABLE FIELD, AND THAT FIELD HAS THE POTENTIAL TO HAVE INFORMATION IN IT, WHEN YOU ALLOW THE USER TO EDIT THE RECORD, YOU PRE-LOAD OF THE INFORMATION THAT THE USER HAS PREVIOUSLY GIVEN UNTO YOU. NOT RETRIEVING THE FUCKER RESULTS IN POSSIBLY IRRECOVERABLE DATA LOSS, AND BY SAINT NIKOLA'S CODPIECE PERHAPS WE DO NOT WANT THIS.

I had been saving p0 catastrophic for best. This, apparently, was what I had been saving it for. Small blessings, I am the only user and also this was on beta. I tend to notice little things such as this. Eventually.

After I calm the hell down (it may be tomorrow morning) I may gently suggest that an RTE is PERHAPS NOT NEEDED if HOLY SHITBALLS FOLKS DO YOU NOT TEST ANY OF THESE THINGS I SHOULD SERIOUSLY PULL AND PRINT OUT MY FILED BUGS FOR LIGHT HUMOR SOMETIME.