http://www.quora.com/Job-Interviews/What-is-the-most-bizarre-job-interview-you-have-ever-been-party-to

Not specifically tech, but some interesting tales nonetheless.

B

 TRWTF is "You must be logged in to read this answer <Facebook button> <Twatter button>"

 That site can straight up kiss my ass.

 

Earthquake guy has an amusing story though.

TRWTF is definitely Quora.

After using BugMeNot to find a login, I started reading through the comments. Yes, they're pretty good! But every minute or two, something keeps shifting the page contents so I briefly lose where I was reading.

No amount of content, quality or otherwise, can justify treating visitors like that. Site does not deserve visitors.

And of course the popup doesn't work right under Android, hiding 3/4th of it off screen.

bode:

http://www.quora.com/Job-Interviews/What-is-the-most-bizarre-job-interview-you-have-ever-been-party-to

Not specifically tech, but some interesting tales nonetheless.

B

So do you work for Quora, or are you just dumb enough to use Facebook/Twitter to log in to random websites?

From my moderator experience, he works for Quora. Else, he /she wouldn't quote the site's name on the title. TRWTF is that, no matter the language, these people make the same mistakes.

bode:

http://www.quora.com/Job-Interviews/What-is-the-most-bizarre-job-interview-you-have-ever-been-party-to

At first, I read: Jobs interview, as in our late beloved overlord of the shiny status symbol.

Sorry, didn't realise it was necessary to be logged in to view content, my mistake. Worth noting that you don't need to use a Twitter/Facebook account to do this though.

Also, I don't work for Quora (though I suppose I have no way to prove this), I just added the source to the title for... accuracy, advance warning, lulz..? Personally I quite like it when sources are well cited, but a mod can change it as preferred.

setasensei:

From my moderator experience, he works for Quora. Else, he /she wouldn't quote the site's name on the title. TRWTF is that, no matter the language, these people make the same mistakes.

He does not work for Quora.

bode:

Sorry, didn't realise it was necessary to be logged in to view content, my mistake.

 

I know of many places where read access is anonymous, but write requires login (like this place).

Strangely, this requires login just for read without any pressure to contribute.

I'll pass.

bode:

Worth noting that you don't need to use a Twitter/Facebook account to do this though.

That wasn't obvious to me from the annoying popup with the large Twatter/Facefook icons.

 

Quora:

Connecting helps us surface content that is relevant to you. We'll never post without your permission

What does it mean by 'surfacing' content - websites should not make up buzzwords and then use it as a reason to hand over other unrelated website login details. 

 

While I don't ming using Facebook to login (and actually prefer this as it saves me some registration time), I decided it's time to give up when I read this: "We'll also check your contacts to see who you already know on Quora." Before you ask, I have a meaningless empty FB account with no likes, no friends, all false data etc used exactly for purposes of logging into random sites. This is also the only FB account I have.

Actually, it's quite suitable to post a link to Quora on TDWTF. I've been trying to read the linked page - after logging in with a fake account I found online as LoremIpsum suggested - but posts keep changing their position and the site keeps randomly scrolling to different positions while I read. This makes it very hard to focus on a post. This is apparently a feature - the posts get reordered according to some magic ordering rules.

I refuse to browse any site that hides content from unregistered users. This includes Facebook, but not necessarily for that reason.

On ExpertSexchange you can usually scroll past the pretend content and find the real content, but I still have contempt for that site.

Google frowns on showing its bot different content than regular users, a blackhat SEO practice called cloaking. Content blocked sites often allow Google to spider them though, and sometimes a user agent switch is all it takes to read "protected" content.

joe.edwards:

Google frowns on showing its bot different content than regular users, a blackhat SEO practice called cloaking. Content blocked sites often allow Google to spider them though, and sometimes a user agent switch is all it takes to read "protected" content.

Then again, if Quora hides it's answers from the Googlebot too, they probably wouldn't get delisted but it's still plenty wtf.

joe.edwards:

Content blocked sites often allow Google to spider them though, and sometimes a user agent switch is all it takes to read "protected" content.

Huh, never thought of that.  For ExpertSexchange I used to either look at the cached site or (later) just scroll down to the bottom where the answers were hidden.

joe.edwards:

[...] sometimes a user agent switch is all it takes to read "protected" content.

Depends how savvy the webmaster is. Bad-behavior blocks that trick.

The logins on bugmenot seem to have been disabled, so I create another for DWTF readers: user: sausage@mailinator.com pass: sausage

MiffTheFox:

joe.edwards:

Google frowns on showing its bot different content than regular users, a blackhat SEO practice called cloaking. Content blocked sites often allow Google to spider them though, and sometimes a user agent switch is all it takes to read "protected" content.

Then again, if Quora hides it's answers from the Googlebot too, they probably wouldn't get delisted but it's still plenty wtf.

Strangely enough, when I ask google to search for that particular URL, it does not show any cache links and if I try to query google cache directly, it says it does not have the page at all. So I can't check whether they actually hide the content or not. But they are screwed either way. If they hide it, they are loosing visitors, because people won't find them and if they are showing it, they are violating google terms of service and risk being deleted from it.

 Gotta love some of the official responses to comments on that BadBehavior site. It's basically a bunch of "not our problem, must be your fault, go fix it" type of responses, expecting that all the people complaining know how to "fix it" and are technically competent.

ASheridan2:

 Gotta love some of the official responses to comments on that BadBehavior site. It's basically a bunch of "not our problem, must be your fault, go fix it" type of responses, expecting that all the people complaining know how to "fix it" and are technically competent.

To be fair to Michael, he does expend some effort on trying to help people; there's only so much you can do to try and integrate software into modules for various 'popular' templating systems, and there really isn't a lot that can be done to help with the "it doesn't work, waaaahhhh!" type complaints that fail to give any details/error messages.

I've been using it for a few years on both bespoke sites and more recently on a mediawiki site; it was reasonably easy to set up and never had any problems with it. Then again, I generally know what I'm doing with that sort of thing so probably fall on the "technically competent" side of the fence.

PJH:

Then again, I generally know what I'm doing with that sort of thing so probably fall on the "technically competent" side of the fence.

Yeah, some of the people are difinitely not on that side of the fence.

I do worry about using a library like this that would potentially prevent legitimate visitors though. There are plenty of valid reasons for proxies, and more than one reason why someone might be altering their user agent string, and shared dynamic IP addresses are becoming more commonplace these days, especially with cheap ISPs that aren't doing much to transition to IPv6.

 

ASheridan2:

I do worry about using a library like this that would potentially prevent legitimate visitors though. There are plenty of valid reasons for proxies, and more than one reason why someone might be altering their user agent string, and shared dynamic IP addresses are becoming more commonplace these days, especially with cheap ISPs that aren't doing much to transition to IPv6.

I've been through the source of it, and it's basically a glorified black list.

Proxies aren't blocked outright - just known 'bad' ones (that only spammers use, or are patently broken and sending duff requests.)

UA strings are only examined for one of two situations: (1) it's a known string associated with spammer's tools - something a 'legitimate' user wouldn't have access to and (2) what started this - if you're pretending to be a spider, but your IP address doesn't match any of the netblocks associated with the entity that should be using that spider.

Not sure I understand the relevance of shared dynamic IP addresses, but if it's a reference to the RBL's used; the RBLs are off by default and it has to be a conscious decision by the site maintainer to turn it on.

 That's a bit more reassuring then. I assumed it was using some sort of GA to determine who gets rejected.

I made a screenshot for you guys so you can read the page.

I had to do install two extensions, install Firefox (I was using Nightly but apperently that's not a good idea if you enjoy having extensions work), install an extension again and spend one minute expanding replies just to take the screenshot. Then I had to try five free image hosting services, all of which failed to work in weird and imaginative ways, before managing to upload it, and along the way Firefox decided to leave a floating thumbnail in my screen that won't go away even after killing Firefox, so you better enjoy that screenshot.

spamcourt:

I made a screenshot for you guys so you can read the page.

I had to do install two extensions, install Firefox (I was using Nightly but apperently that's not a good idea if you enjoy having extensions work), install an extension again and spend one minute expanding replies just to take the screenshot. Then I had to try five free image hosting services, all of which failed to work in weird and imaginative ways, before managing to upload it, and along the way Firefox decided to leave a floating thumbnail in my screen that won't go away even after killing Firefox, so you better enjoy that screenshot.

Android isn't too keen on rendering images with resolution expressed in scientific notation. And yet my iPad's okay with it, which I definitely wasn't expecting.

spamcourt:

I was using Nightly but apperently that's not a good idea if you enjoy having extensions work

Anecdatum: I'm on Nightly (cronjob to pull and compile around 0100UTC) and only seem to have a permanent problem with only one of the 13 extensions I have installed. Author of said extension has shown no interest in my offer of help to figure out what's wrong, and I can't say I've really missed it.

Of course, neither of your two extensions will be installed on my system....

I think we've all established on this forum that Firefox now sucks, I'm sorry.

Sutherlands:

joe.edwards:

Content blocked sites often allow Google to spider them though, and sometimes a user agent switch is all it takes to read "protected" content.

Huh, never thought of that.  For ExpertSexchange I used to either look at the cached site or (later) just scroll down to the bottom where the answers were hidden.

On a semi-related note, I always enjoy when sites redirect to their main full-site if I hit one of their mobile-targeted subpages from my desktop browser.

I use IE, but is there a Firefox extension where you can mark a site that does this, and if you try to go to them in the future, it pops something up along the lines of "remember what they did to you last time?..."

Nexzus:

On a semi-related note, I always enjoy when sites redirect to their main full-site if I hit one of their mobile-targeted subpages from my desktop browser.

Not sure if that's better or worse then a "404 page" that's just a 302 to the main page.

blakeyrat:

I think we've all established on this forum that Firefox now sucks, I'm sorry.

Have you totally given up reading any of the posts to which you reply?

PJH:

Author of said extension has shown no interest in my offer of help to figure out what's wrong, and I can't say I've really missed it.

 

 Try Youtube MP3 Podcaster   Pretty much the same features, except that it works and is actively developed.  It'll also just rip a mp3 for you, if that's your bag.