This is about 100% of websites we have to use in the military so the surplus stores are just modelling their source.
However, the recruiting websites for the branches are super modern and full of motivational pictures. Probably built on a contract instead of in-house.
[deleted] ยท 103 points ยท Posted at 18:25:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Probably built on a contract instead of in-house.
Funding is separate of course. The recruitment websites are handled by advertising agencies.
Hence what I said. If the military was hands-on, the recruiting websites would be down for a week every other month for maintenance and would require Internet Explorer 6 or lower. Unauthorized certificates on all other browsers. To get my TAP classes done at home I had to load it up in Microsoft Edge and use their "Load in Internet Explorer" option. It's ridiculous.
JoeM5952 ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 18:43:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Like DTS with the terrible java issues it has. Same for Arrows but the requires IE in compatibility mode and a terrible java setup.
alamuki ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 21:36:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
"You have an unsigned DTS document waiting for you."
"You need to upgrade your Java to run this program."
"You need an administrator to run this program. Please contact your help desk."
"You need to submit a work order to request this service."
"Thanks for updating your Java!" (48-72 hours, calculated in work days, weekends don't count)
"Welcome to DTS, we have upgraded our website. Please update your Java"
The trick is to use it when nobody else is. Once the US East Coast wakes up you're fucked. I realized this in Germany when I could easily submit travel tickets in the morning but after lunch the website turned to shit.
DTS? Leaveweb with its damn gradkell db sign makes me want to throw my keyboard out the window every time I have to go find a different computer just to submit leave.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:32:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Lol damn sorry. I did my TAP on base and never had to deal with that craziness.
I was a joint base and they tried to schedule every single one of my classes on the other base when my base had the classes too. I elected to do it online because fuck that spaghetti bowl.
No, a PowerPoint briefing will suffice. I'll need it to go a good 30 minutes past the point where I'm considering suicide to escape the brief though, so that way we can head right into the suicide prevention brief.
To piggy back off what /u/ChainsawSnuggling said, we need an excessively long PowerPoint presentation on how to get ADLS working followed by suicide prevention and a group SAPR brief.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:27:29 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I've seen regular websites go down for maintenance before. Usually it's for a few hours during non-peak time. Never have I ever seen entire swaths of websites (aside from torrent sites) go down for a week or longer and then the down time gets extended. That is unique to the government, I'd say.
MilPDS sites went down for a week just a few days before my final-out. I had to run around the base getting signatures to make sure I wasn't delayed. Like hell I was going to let them fuck with my terminal leave.
I would be incredibly surprised if any of those military sites were built in-house. Almost all building of things is done by contract. The problem is that too many people have a say, resulting in a terrible product, and it's so painful to get another one built that it remains until it is literally unusable.
Sometimes a website will be high speed, but in a 2000s bloated as fuck, interactive video kind of way so it turns out garbage on most government internet regardless.
wrightmf ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:57:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
big box guns shops and those with people working there under 40 have good sites but any gun shop owned and operated baby boomers on a rural area looks like its from 1996
chaos0510 ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 17:45:05 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly. All the local bodyshops in my town have websites that look like they were made on Geocities by a 7 year old autistic child
AATroop ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:50:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Their website and UI is super, super ugly and outdated though. It is possible that they could make it look nicer while also keeping the simplicity of usability. Intuitiveness and a nice looking website are not mutually exclusive traits.
cliffotn ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 22:23:35 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
But - why?
Sure it's ugly, but 100% easy to use and fully functional. They almost have zero competition, the few ads they charge for (most are free), are super cheap. They serve folks in over 570 cities, with just a few dozen employees.
Of course they could make it an astonishingly gorgeous website, but there'd be a cost - and the users would likely end up paying more - possibly ads that are now free would have to be paid for.
e_z_p_z_ ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 05:03:27 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It looks just like reddit
pgrily ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 18:58:00 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Younger guy here--I'd be really annoyed if they changed it much because it's really fucking simple to navigate and doesn't have any bloat. A few small tweaks maybe, but the layout is perfect.
I mean, remember two years ago when Reddit had a functional mobile site and choosing to sort comments by "New" in mobile didn't just try and ram you into the front page or beat you over the head with a crappy app?
Craigslist is a clean, functional site that cares more about being able to scroll through pages easily than having a shiny look. The second they change it to look like every-other site, half of their users will be confused and leave.
Craigslist is so popular because it has just a simple design. It's one of its main features and in my opinion way better than similar sites with more modern design like kijiji.
Craigslist's ethos is to only make changes that are necessary, or actually improve things.
I mean, look at the interface of Reddit. It's pretty damn simple too.
While I like the content on The Verge's website, can we just organize that shit in a list please? I don't need the funky boxes and shit, really, it doesn't enhance my experience, it's just a technical/design circlejerk.
Now get off my lawn.
Jms1078 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 05:44:57 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, except your password must be 39 characters long, must contain an equal amount of numbers, symbols, upper, and lower case letters.
You must change your password every 5th hour, and if you are 20 seconds late your password resets.
Also, you have to email customer support from your account to retrieve your new password.
iotku ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 04:03:51 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Created during the West Coast Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon
Not bad.
pete404 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:43:15 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That's a good one
alamuki ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 21:39:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
And Wikipedia, those bastards. Wiki leaks, I understand (still stupid but since secret docs do end up there it could fuck a lot of stupid people up), but Wikipedia blocking is just dumb.
the government still believes that the internet is just a fad.
bogidyboy ยท 317 points ยท Posted at 15:46:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I forgot the source, but there was a Supreme Court meeting where one of the justices referred to Netflix as "Netflick" and seemed to not understand what Net Neutrality actually is
I like it when a child comment has more karma than the parent, since the trend tends to be that the parent has about 20% more than the child, but this has about 500% of it's parent's karma, and that excites me.
bdavbdav ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 12:40:58 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
As a person who got more karma than me for a comment you made in response to someone's response to my comment, I assure you I'm mean-mugging the shit out of this comment.
bogidyboy ยท 36 points ยท Posted at 16:14:10 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Here's my possibly-oversimplification of it: ISPs shouldn't be able to control what content their subscribers see on the internet, which websites load fastest, or which websites do/don't count towards your data plan.
MadaCheeb ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 16:24:51 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Ok, so to put it even more simply, it's giving ISP's even more power to fuck with my browsing?
bogidyboy ยท 38 points ยท Posted at 16:36:35 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is what the internet would look like without net neutrality.
To be fair, that's more of a "worst case scenario" and I find it hard to believe it would ever actually get that bad, but it's still worth fighting against!
cain8708 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 16:48:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I feel that doesnt really tell me what net neutrality is. It felt like what the market is already doing now, higher costs lower services.
[deleted] ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 17:00:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Currently isp's provide you a certain mb/sec (or max mbs per month) . You use those to travel wherever you want on the net. no site is favoured. If a site is slower than others, its because the servers of the site are bad/lacking, not because the isp is fucking with it.
No net neutrality means the isp can go to website x and demand a certain amount of cash, otherwise it will throttle the site. It means the isps (which have no competition in many parts) can kill the competition in every other service that relies on the net.
cain8708 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:51:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
While i agree thats bad, that doesnt solve the other end of the problem. Many people can only get internet from one or maybe two companies. Those companies charge huge amounts of money for internet, before we even get to the neutrality part, because they are the only ones who can provide that service.
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:39:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
net neutrality stops the abusive markets from spreading to every other net related ones.
cain8708 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:08:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I hope that once we dont have to worry about net neutrality we can work on these huge monopolies than run access to the internet itself. I know thats a whole different ballgame and people will have their opinion on what is too much government interference. But in some places in major cities for speeds above 5mbps there is only one company.
Net Neutrality is the concept of an open internet. If you get internet service, being neutral means you can open your browser and go to any site you want. The linked example is what cable is, not neutral. Let's say you wanted to visit Reddit in a non-neutral internet. You can't, unless you pay extra monthly to your ISP.
cain8708 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:12:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Thank you. I scrolled through it and figured it was what could happen if net neutrality didnt happen. I just think it would be better if in that link they also tell you info instead of the cheap scare tactic.
ours ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:31:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
He's partially wrong. They won't technically forbid you to go to Reddit but they can make it slower than other sites to view. Then you can pay have have faster access to Reddit (i.e. normal speed in a net neutral Internet).
cain8708 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:18:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Kinda like throttling? Only instead of it being the data cap being the unit of measure, itll be the customer's cash.
ours ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:17:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly like throttling. You pay for a big pipe, the total flow stays the same but Youtube/Netflix or whatever are artificially slowed down unless you pay up.
It actually requires effort from them to throttle these specific sites.
cain8708 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:18:22 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I guess they figured if it worked for phones, why not internet? Its amazing how much companies will work to make extra money, but will make the customer work to prove they are owed money.
veggiter ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:02:05 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Well you're not wrong in that it's a catchy name that simplifies what it entails, but you are totally off the mark in terms of Orwell's stuff and how it relates to power and misinformation, which is really the crux of what he was talking about.
[deleted] ยท 19 points ยท Posted at 16:29:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Without net neutrality, your ISP can make websites like Netflix (for example) virtually unusable because they want you to use their own streaming service. And if you want to use Netflix, they'll charge extra for it.
In theory, ISPs will be able to turn the internet into an a la carte service where you pay more or less, depending on the websites you want to use.
Net neutrality basically says your ISP must treat all internet traffic equally.
MadaCheeb ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 16:30:38 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh! Ok, so Net Neutrality is a good thing. I think I get it now. Thanks all for your help!
yep. ISPs want to sell it as having 'fast lanes' for certain sites. in reality its discrimination for unfavourable sites/content/etc, netflix as an example, and privilege for those that can pay extra to not be throttled(stifled/controlled).
data is data, charging differently on what are ultimately baseless reasons gives ISPs an opportunity to create control over your overall internet usage. its a slippery slope
IIRC there was a lot more stuff in the Net Neutrality proposal that gave way too much power to government over this stuff so that's why it was so divisive.
lol I always imagined her as being from Minnesota but I'm pretty sure she was raised in California, in one of our "cow towns". She comes from a very religious family.
do you expect the justices of the supreme court to know the ins and outs of literally everything? they're not superbeings, especially about a term that probably had never been written until like 7 years ago.
again, what cases have they ruled on where this has mattered?
Vbarb ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:07:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
just a bunch of tubes and the tubes are getting too full
tgp1994 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:06:08 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is why we don't need the FCC, we already have the Federal Tube Commission.
thapol ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:10:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Close! But it's not nearly as fun (awful) of a picture as just 'gobments stupid.'
DC is terrifyingly slow on the tech side, but that's because we keep getting reps that might as well be Amish as far as technology is concerned.
Because of this, we typically end up with entranced tech companies (and people) that are themselves practically archaic in their design, structure, and implementation. They'll consistently get the contracts because they've consistently gotten contracts (Stupid? Y'damn skippy it is.)
A concerted push to resolve those issues has been made by the most recent administration! (It's how I got one of my jobs there) But it means dick if those agencies don't get the needed coordination from the state level (coughACA*cough), or (see last point).
Unlike private companies, most government agencies don't have the luxury to just kill everything with fire from orbit, and start anew. Backwards compatibility is needed, and 'comparability' typically means the following scenario:
'Someone who didn't know what they were doing made this badly, and it's had 10 years to work its way into every nook and cranny of how [Agency] does things.'
The amount of extra work this creates is mind-numbingly retarding, and the agencies that can do this kind of work, and do it well, cost too much. Which leads me to my last point...
Pretty much every public service agency only gets enough to maintain themselves. Does it matter that the long-term maintenance will cost more because of a shitty & archaic system? Nope! Because that's not how budgeting works in the public sector*.
Which causes their overall ability to do things at the rate of technology to fall off as quickly as technology advances. As this spiral continues, people lose faith in said agency, and its funding is continually restricted... repeat ad naseum.
TL;DR: Want a working gob'ment? Gotta pay for it (or at least make sure it gets more than just the minimum to get by).
*: Feel free to correct me on this; just what I could see as a lowly contractor
magnora7 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:24:42 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Nah they have teams doing messaging and PR on forums and stuff so it's pretty legit now I think
Compare government websites in States where they don't want you to be helped vs government websites in places like the United Kingdom... Its almost as if governments that have shitty websites do it on purpose
PfftNope ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:40:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Boss, our database is 17 years old I'd like to upgrade it.
Ok, what's wrong with it?
Well technically it still works, but it's so outdated I can barely find documentation for it. We can't upgrade these dozen other services because they all require the newer database version. And who knows how much longer the hardware will hold on. If the hardware dies it's going to be a nightmare trying to restore it because nothing else we've got can run OS '98. We've also grown beyond our original expected usage for this hardware so it's pretty slow.
But it's working fine now?
for now.
Ok, so how big of a project would this be?
Since we're 6 major versions behind, we won't be able to upgrade in place. We'll need to purchase two more database servers, a new san, the new database software, operating system, and renew our support contract. My estimate is about $X00,000 and 2-3 months to complete it.
Hmm...but it's still working now? I don't think we've got time for this this year. Maybe we can get it on the 2017 schedule.
...but in 2015 you said we'd get it on the 2016 schedule.
[deleted] ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 02:58:17 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
puh-lease! We run mission-critical, life-and-death software that was last updated in 1995. The client only runs in a VT500 emulator and the server runs on OpenVMS (EOL'd before my high schooler was born)
[deleted] ยท 189 points ยท Posted at 18:00:06 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Where is the impetus for them to do so?
If you're a private company and your website looks awful people will assume your company is run badly and business will suffer. Government has no competition in many areas and therefore there is no economic pressure to upgrade, because departments would rather spend the money on obscene overtime payments for staff than a good website.
I work at a university in a country where the state is involved in the universities, and the private colleges (which are considered less prestigious) overwhelmingly have better websites. Quite simply there is more pressure on them to have them.
Oxyfire ยท 42 points ยท Posted at 18:41:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
if you're a private company and your website looks awful people will assume your company is run badly and business will suffer.
and then you have punkbuster Who's website looked like something from 2000 up until a few years ago and I'm pretty sure they're still used as an anti-cheat in some games. I only know this because BF3 had all sorts of problems with punkbuster and the solution often involved getting some file directly from punkbuster's website. Granted, at that point I didn't need their website to tell me they sucked.
Also restaurant websites. Restaurant websites everywhere with horrible layouts. With impossible to find menus and hours....
I honestly think there is a massive market in this. I want to start going around to every local restaurant with a shitty or nonexistent Web page and offering them my services.
I can't even count the number of times I haven't eaten somewhere because no menu was available on the internet, or the menu didn't have pricing information.
It blows my mind so few restaurants actually have updated and working websites. Chains tend to have decent sites, because their parent companies aren't idiots that think it's optional, but I'd guess only around 33% of my local restaurants have a functional site.
Maybe they are too cheap for it to be viable and they will all turn me down but I am starting to try it in Jan. 2017. There are so many restaurants in my city that I can't imagine at least a couple wouldn't take me up... and then I can use that to advertise/pressure the others.
"Hey, look at your competitors sweet new website!"
Good luck! Offer a few decent templates and make the site Google and mobile friendly and you should get takers. Restaurants understandably hate to spend money, but showing them their site doesn't even work on a phone should open some wallets.
Restaurants are moving their online presence over to Facebook, that's why you see a lot of defunct websites. Not only is it free, younger people tend to scout for a good place to eat this way, plus the page can be 'liked' so they can keep in contact with customers.
That does make sense... but I don't think most people check Facebook first for restaurants.
I know that personally I need to see a menu WITH prices before I go to a place I've never been. I am obviously not talking about fine dining here... but casual places should have that stuff up imo.
We will see! It is definitely my plan to make a little extra money in the New Year. I think I have a good enough sales pitch I can convince a lot it is needed. Especially once I have done one for a competitor/another local place.
Fyi Facebook has a 'view menu' option for restaurants. But yeah good luck, still themajority of restaurants have their own websites, I just think the industry is moving to a social media type online presence (and that's only the more forward thinking establishments) there's still money to be made.
Aaod ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:23:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I set the bar so low that all they have to have is an address and hours they are open and large portions of them fail at even that and you are expecting up to date prices?
Yeah except behind every terrible website is a terrible business owner who doesn't want to invest in things working properly.
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:29:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Ah, Punkbuster, there's a name I haven't heard in awhile.
53bvo ยท 25 points ยท Posted at 18:29:02 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The government websites in my country (Netherlands) actually look quite neat most of the time. The military also has some of the best looking commercials (although they do have competitors on the job market).
Most people, municipalities and government departments have some pride in what they do and want to show that through their websites.
America's Army? There's a game now called Squad on Steam that is 1000x better than that but it's the same idea. People actually work as a team there. I played a lot of America's Army when I was younger and Squad really is a lot better. If you like one you'll love the other.
[deleted] ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 21:54:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Americans Army looked like exactly the type of game I was looking for when I was a kid but the signup process was so strange that I was worried I was actually signing myself into a binding contract with the army lol
Yeah the Navy is definitely on top of their game for these videos!
mki401 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:46:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Much harder to convince people to sign up to be bullet sponges with a shitty commercial.
shizzler ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:14:40 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Same in the UK
disguy2k ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:38:39 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
If you can get people to do all the work online themselves you will not need as many cs reps to deal with the general public. Dealing face to face vs a simple online form to get what the person needs is much more efficient.
oryes ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:52:38 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Bingo, instead of spending the money on annoying actual work, they can just give it to themselves.
an0dize ยท -3 points ยท Posted at 18:18:04 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Dude what are you even talking about. All government is completely altruistic, and the free market and private companies can't improve anything other than their own pocketbooks. This is Reddit man, come on. /s
Did you know YOUR government is wasting upwards of hundreds of YOUR tax dollars on frivolous pornography on the internet!? Money that could go to the military! I and my colleagues will shut down the government to stop this runaway spending. Is re-elected six times.
Actually in the past few years there has been a push to update sites to be more modern. You have issues with 508 compliance and govies who fight over control and what technologies to use. It's.. Fun...
I've been involved in this for years.
willpie ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:15:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Why, it's almost like one of the two major political parties is deliberately starving them of funds, so it can make political hay crowing about the incompetence of anyone who'd deign to work for the government!
natziel ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:17:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I work for a non-profit, not the government, but the problem we had (and we're spending a ton of money to fix now) is that the backend ends up going way over budget, which forces the frontend budget to be cut.
You don't ever see the backend, but it's way more important for it to work well than the frontend. An ugly frontend turns some users away, but it's not a security issue, and you can still do what you need to do.
Seriously speaking, why do these govt departments not give a fuck about upgrading? These are essential services for citizens and the ux is terrrible
Cost.
I was a part of a major project to overall the most popular website in my state. Price tag was $450,000 just in services. Probably $1,500,000 for the servers/licensing.
At that level of pricing, you have to have your state legislature approve it.
Then there's just internal bureaucracy and vendors who make terrible products targeted at the government. You know your DMV's website where you can pay traffic tickets or other fees? That's actually run by an external vendor, who gets a slice of the transaction cost, and makes a fucking killing - why isn't it mobile friendly? Why doesn't it use modern UX/UI? Because the vendor don't give a fuck and to change the requirements would mean another act of your legislature. Any website "run by your state" that collects fees is likely actually ran by the same terrible vendor.
Money and regulations. The cry from conservatives about regulations isn't some imaginary concept. Regulations for disabled people and old hardware force updates to be very expensive and cumbersome.
Also the government favors utility over aesthetics because it is cheaper. They also have little expertise in IT areas and not just one source for the work. So each agency or department has little silos if they are lucky of IT people to do the work.
jvnk ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:31:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Depends on the site and agency involved. There are a number of nice federal-level sites in the US:
https://www.vets.gov/ (this one in particular is the result of a miracle - the VA had over 1200 websites at one point apparently, they've since consolidated most of them into this portal)
It depends. If the agency/jurisdiction is poor, they won't have anyone to update things, or it'll be put on a back burner. Some jurisdictions use the same template for everything (State of California, I'm looking at you bastards in CTA), no matter what the agency is, and therefore it's the same shit across all the sites.
The agency I work for migrated to SharePoint last year, and it's improved everything on both the Internet and Intranet sides. We have 2 people working on it part time, and had 1 full-time contract person working on it before it launched. It's a pretty site and fairly easy to navigate.
You know how people complain about government costing too much money?
Know what good internal IT resources cost? (hint: the answer is a whole bunch). Even worse, bad external IT resources also cost a shit ton, and give zero fucks about the quality of the shit they create.
It depends. I got paid $200 to be in a focus group for some feature on some government website. We were one of several focus groups and they ran 40 hours a week. The website was total shit. Could have paid me to do it with less than the cost of a couple focus group sessions.
itijara ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:09:48 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Made my first website ever while working for the government. Can confirm.
As someone who's working a govt website, not all companies do this. Some sites are archaic as hell because they need to be accessible on specific machines and networks, and most of those machines are running Windows 7 and have unsupported IE browsers. It's hell to develop for modern browsers while also accommodating for the old machines that are in use during deployment that can't run modern CSS and whatnot very quickly
ours ยท 33 points ยท Posted at 18:26:13 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
2 project directors, 5 project managers, 8 different flavors of "architects", an army of analysts, 2 testers and 50 developers from the lowest bidder India can offer.
For $250 million I could make some fucking beautiful software, instead of the fucking steaming dumpster fire that they'll end up with.
ours ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:27:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Honorable mention goes to big old private industry bringing in those ex-IBM/Oracle guys 'cause this is a big project and we need people with experience in a big project so let's top load the crap of it and neglect the people who actually know execution.
Countless hours of entertainment hearing a buddy of mine tell me about the multi-million dollar (tens of USD millions and nowhere near completion) project he's in. He himself knows he's a very expensive paper-pusher with some meaningless title. Plus it's private sector so less sad than welfare wasting millions and helping contractors and politicians first, the taxpayer... maybe later.
2 project directors, 5 project managers, 8 different flavors of "architects", an army of analysts, 2 testers and 50 developers from the lowest bidder India Fiverr can offer.
Politicians friends kick back $849,000,000 to politicians.
andrewia ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:21:19 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Can confirm, worked for a state government web host. We charged hundreds a month and something like $20/GB of data transfer.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:57:47 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
A genius in top management contracted the job to a company. Company was like "yeah, for you, $850 million"
The two characters are brothers.
Nepotism.
ZNasT ยท 116 points ยท Posted at 16:03:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Some of my passwords at the gov need to be EXACTLY 8 characters and changed every 3 months without reusing them. I've had to develop a password system based on the current date to avoid losing my mind.
knitedeth ยท 73 points ยท Posted at 17:46:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Or they go way overboard and require a 15 character (I guess 16 was just too much) password with 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, a number, and a symbol from their list. Cannot be the same as your previous 8 passwords, cannot contain repeats, and their system decides if it contains a dictionary word or not. Must be changed every 60 days, and on day 61 (including weekends and holidays) you're locked out and have to call support to reset it.
ZNasT ยท 47 points ยท Posted at 18:01:20 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh god, the support desk calls. Do they want people to keep all their passwords in a plain text document on their desktop? Because it feels that way sometimes.
53bvo ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 18:35:57 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The IT department where I work actually advised to write the password down if you can't remember it. Which is easy due to all the restrictions they require.
flameoguy ยท 26 points ยท Posted at 19:13:43 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I think I know what website you're talking about. Does it also have an option to log in with a CAC card yet, when you do use a CAC card, you're saved no additional steps?
AKO can kiss my ass!!! I had to do Army TAP since joint base. Not only did it crash almost every day, now 2 months post-214, I'm getting at least 3 emails a day to reset my password. I can't find an opt-out for it either.
That is just something else. I'm guessing you could make an alright password with 8 characters and a clever combo of letters and numbers, but I'm not too sure.
Other web developer here, confuses me to no end. Seriously, it would take at least an hour for someone to code this kind of thing up. And probably more considering how old most government websites are and how primitive their code is.
Vbarb ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 19:36:35 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I hate this so much. One of the community colleges I went to did this. So I couldn't pull up my classes or change anything until Monday morning at 7 if I wanted to do anything on my account Friday night.
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 01:33:26 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You can't expect them to pay their servers overtime every day!!
mazu74 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 07:05:07 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh God my community college did that.
Why? Fucking why? I just got off work at midnight and all I wanted to do was just check my grades but nope! Apparently servers have to sleep overnight.
maciozo ยท 130 points ยท Posted at 15:26:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The UK government website actually seems pretty decent. So at least we have that going for us...
[deleted] ยท 77 points ยท Posted at 15:42:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
http://gov.uk is the shit. Got their own sexy arse typeface too. And mmmm the driving license application form.. That is some good shit. Let's you provide your passport details to pull your passport image and put it on your license.
Benmjt ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 23:21:52 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
An exemplaryโand award-winningโwebsite. Something to be truly proud of.
draaakje ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:33:11 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah i thought so until I helped someone apply for a UK visa. Lots of vagueness and the helpline was outsourced to some 3rd party for profit, based somewhere which apparently had laws against taking the gobstopper out of your cake hole.
I once met a couple of people on the UK government payroll who worked on one of their many microservices. They're not doling out contracts to the best bidder but rather have over a dozen teams working on different aspects of web development like a modern conglomerate would.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:39:05 on December 23, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Even my local council website is modern and informative. Can't complain.
Gov.uk is really good, though. You can do so much without picking up a phone. Register to vote, tax your car, etc.
Takes literally 2 minutes to register to vote now. Very nice.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:19:34 on January 17, 2017 ยท (Permalink)
http://usa.gov/ has recently been refreshed and it too is decent.
gov.uk is probably one of the best information website designs I've ever seen. I use it as a reference for any UX issues I come across in my own designs.
snowyday ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:46:52 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Wow that's awesomely hilarious for me. My job is maintaining government websites that match the OP and I've slowly been updating them. The problem is I'm not a web developer and volunteered for the job to get out of my rut. I could actually use this. Thanks!
knitedeth ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 18:27:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, that's an easy fix...just have your CSA install the new DoD VPN. Only takes about 3 months to get approved, then they need your laptop for at least a week, you get it back and nothing works...so they remote in and reinstall it (taking an hour or so). Now you're all set up, except the 16 character password that requires changing every 60 days (see rules above) and it only works with IE8, so now you have to get the retro-grade update....finally all done...what's that?!? A new VPN version is out and only works with IE9....repeat ad nauseam.
utt73 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:14:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That's because most .mil sites create their own TLS cert instead of paying a CA. Browsers don't recognize the CA, because there isn't one, and toss this error.
Actually, they do have a CA. The problem is the cert most likely expired. The current people maintaining the site are not the people that made it and either don't know it's broken or are too lazy to update it
utt73 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:17:34 on December 22, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can write us at the address shown above. However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response.
517634 ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 17:45:03 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Seriously.. that's really confusing to me. I mean I know that built-in ads were once commonplace, but you figure that Geico's contract for that ad would have run out by now.
5mk ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 18:49:37 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They own Geico
raydio27 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:41:07 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They're advertising it because it's THEIR company. They're so big they literally OWN Geico.
Can confirm, governments never seem to hire decent web designers.
otisanek ยท 34 points ยท Posted at 16:25:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They generally don't even hire actual web designers. I was an IT specialist for the government and ended up on the committee that was responsible for building the new website for our organization.
Never built a page in my life past college, and I found that a majority of decisions seem to be made by people nearing retirement who cannot accept change from the early 90s aesthetic.
vizualb ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:54:45 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It doesn't have to look pretty, but some of these websites have super user unfriendly UI and navigation. Trying to fill out a form with multiple text fields is one I've ran into a few times that can be extremely frustrating
draaakje ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:42:54 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
And that's how you end up with shitty websites. Design is not (just) about the look and feel. It's mainly about function. Check out the British government website. Not flashy / fancy but simple, clear and easy-to-use. Basically, it works very well.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:27:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They just use Doug from down the hall who looked at some HTML once.
JZN ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 16:37:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I used Massachusetts unemployment for three weeks a few years ago during a bad new housing stretch. The website closed at 5pm, the password requirements were even worse than those, with the added comfort of PIN numbers, and most of the navigation sent you in circles back to the home page or demanded you call someone anyway. Got to wonder if it's intentional...
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:02:22 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That's how MO state services sites are. Everything is a loop to call someone, you can't actually do very much online and you have to sit on hold forever.
[deleted] ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 16:57:39 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You also have to change your fucking password like every 2 months, and there has to be a combo of caps, letters, numbers, and at least one symbol.
And if you get it wrong twice, you're locked out.
Deltaan ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 17:21:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
guaranic ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:20:36 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Local website There's been a ton of government modernizing of websites within the last few years.
H0LT45 ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:13:54 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Insert broken search function.
toolsheds ยท 19 points ยท Posted at 15:56:54 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
"We're still using Windows XP servers or Windows Servers in general" starter pack
Proceed to take 9 seconds to load a web page
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:29:20 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I know someone that works for ReMax and they still use XP on all of their office computers. And the printer is so old that you cant connect it to a Windows 10 laptop or a Macbook. I get that it's expensive to upgrade every computer, but it's 15 years old...
Beowoof ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:08:06 on December 22, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Wait what's wrong with windows servers? Isn't .NET super common? Like yes, Linux servers are by far the majority, but I didn't think there was anything wrong with windows servers.
I have done work for the state as a software contractor. Mostly on a big public-transit web page. Let me explain to you why government websites looks so stupid. First off, they don't hire designers, they hire nerds like me. It's amazing how much better your site / app looks when you decide to pay a good UX/UI guy or a Front End guy who knows some UX. They instead use boring, stable technology like ASP.NET or Java spring. The main goal for them is for the site to work, not for it to look nice.
The thing is, if your site isn't designed so that people can use it easily, it doesn't work. UX is a fundamental requirement, not just a 'nice to have' to make it look pretty.
It might not throw server errors constantly, but if nobody can achieve what they needed to when they opened the page, you may as well not have bothered.
I agree, UX is a fundamental requirement. There is a reason people go to school for years to learn UX. Guy's like me (try as I may) don't have the creative skill to design a UI the 'right way'. Shit, I use vim + tmux tied together with bash scripts as an IDE on Xubuntu. Why the fuck would I know how to design a UI?
I was hoping someone would post this, because if not I was going to and I couldn't remember what podcast it was on. I would have guessed 99pi first.
but this here will give anyone wondering why it's this way the answers they want
Farisr9k ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:01:04 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
So glad someone posted this.
tl;dl : the tender process is SO FUCKING COMPLICATED AND CONVOLUTED only a couple of companies actually know all the secrets to submitting a tender - so they do every whenever a 'refresh' is requested. And they essentially just tweak the existing design because they have no competition. Oh, and they paid like $500K for their 'work'.
One of my internship jobs was looking up School District Websites and verifying that their mailing addresses were up to date. You would not believe how many animated gifs I saw.
bge ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 16:51:24 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
My favorite part is logging into what you think is your account only to be redirected to another page asking you to sign in with another account for a service named with an obscure acronym you've never heard of. After that you've got about another 80% chance of having to sign into an obsolete Microsoft of Oracle system with a username and password that may be either of the previous ones, or a new one altogether.
Or the opposite end of the spectrum for passwords. Must be greater than 8 characters contain letters and numbers, at least 2 capitals, at least 2 special symbols, can not be any of your last 10 passwords, cannot contain any party if your name, cannot contain any part of your SSN, cannot contain any part of your DOB, cannot contain any part of the answerable security questions. Thanks AKO....
No consecutive numbers may touch
No repeating numbers
Can't be DOB.
Can't be last 4
Can't contain the numbers in your unit, battalion, brigade, or division
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:01:42 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Imagine something 10x worse, welcome to Indian govt websites.
wrecktvf ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:23:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Please add "(This process can only be completed between 9 am and 5 pm, Mon to Fri. Please try again later.)" Why some New York state websites can only operate during their office hours is beyond me.
rofl_rob ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 16:24:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Usually starter packs are very localized but this one is very international.
Not sure how common this is, but our inventory software is MS-DOS based. Oh and a government website I access daily that has confidential information always triggers privacy alerts in Chrome and I'm told I should exit the website. Oh and we also have manufacturing plants in China. But it's ok because everything is kept separate.
joedl1 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:36:18 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
As a student who interned in a corporate tax department this summer, I can tell you first hand each state's own slightly different and totally shit site for collecting corporate tax is horrible. One thing I wish each state didn't do differently.
Wish the password was more accurate. More like
Minimum 14 characters and must contain an upper, lower, number, symbol, and has to be changed every 60 days, and a govt ID login where you enter your pin # 3 times before getting through to a half functioning website.
iemfi ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:57:20 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Here some of them shut down for the night.
Ohsoeasy ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:35:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, and the search box is useless unless you want to look through thousands of results.
RTwhyNot ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:54:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You are missing the the obvious lack of security. Nice to have my personal data out there for the world to have.
Natatos ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:19:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I don't know if it's still broken, but about a year ago I tried visiting the Senate website using HTTPS everywhere. Their certificates were out of date or set up wrong, and if it was forced to use HTTPS the website would just redirect to the home page. I sent an email to an IT related email for the Senate saying that needed to be fixed, and mentioned HTTPS everywhere.
I got no response at all, but tried visiting the website a week later, and instead of it working, they changed it to redirect to a page saying that certain plugins could cause the website to break.
Also, it only works with outdated versions of Internet Explorer
zpeed ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:29:23 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The whole thing is also written in HTML
Apeshaft ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:39:29 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Here in Sweden Arbetsfรถrmedlingen (unemployment office) spent 100.000.000 kr on a new web site and after two years they said fuck it and scrapped the whole project.
Hey there. Government employee here (US DOT). This is very accurate except for one thing. Password requirements. Password requirements for internet databases we use dont state the password requirements (you have to guess) but are often: no words from the dictionary (wtf) one capital one punctuation and at least one letter and number. We're also required to change them all the fucking time. I forget mine often. Coworkers of mine write them on post it notes and stick them to their monitors because they forget them all the time and also because THEYRE FUCKING INSANE
States actually have competitions with each other each year for the best designed website. Or so I've heard from a state worker who was on the state website development team for Washington State.
This is like the clearest cut example of just how inefficient our government really is. Then compare it to any website in the private sector. It's a joke.
Everything except the password. It's usually no fewer than 10 characters, must contain at least one uppercase, one number, one special character and no repeated characters.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:38:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Tfw you live in PA so government websites are decent.
PA-Noa ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:55:59 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Also starter pack for small local stores websites
mitts281 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:07:13 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
YMMV, to be honest. I've seen some government websites that haven't had a revamp since 2006, and I've seen some that look like masterpieces that were deployed last week. It's more the latter than the former though.
I can understand the IE6, 800x600 part. Governmental websites need to be accessible for all, even if they're running their OS on a potato over dial-up.
_Swagas_ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:59:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Not always true. I work for a state government department that does a majority of our services through our website. Our website is actually pretty up-to-date, simple, pleasant-looking, and user-friendly.
Some other departments in my state, though...their websites are definitely stuck in the early 2000s.
Mr_Genji ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:38:05 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot about code base size. Healthcare.gov comes to mind.
chrslp ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:54:47 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh you wanted to check out a health plan then go back to check out another? You have to restart from the beginning now!
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:59:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Many of the US government websites are actually pretty nice now like whitehouse.gov, USA.gov, cia.gov, and house.gov. Just don't head over to dea.gov because their site is just as bad as the organization itself
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:24:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Fuck the Canadian student loan website. You get a message saying you have urgent mail, so you go to the site to check. Try logging in, site crashes. Try again, now it tells you your account has been locked because of a failed attempt to log in. So now you have to call their help line to unlock it and they just tell you to make a new account in the future... Why am I able to just make a new account every time? How is that more secure than just not locking my account in the first place...
MCR4Lyfe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:26:28 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Unless you're talking about GOV.UK which is actually a great site.
moeburn ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:16:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
These starterpacks are really having to spell out the joke lately, huh? It's starting to become like a 1920's political cartoon where they just slap "SOCIALISM" on a pig or something.
I swear to God the people who design government websites are all 60 year old technicans who still don't know how to use all the newfangled technology like email.
Government sites must be completely ADA compliant and work with a variety of technologies across different generations. A lot of patch jobs have taken the place of legitimately upgrading to newer systems. It is going to take a huge investment on a local and national level to fix this across the board. By the time that happens, they will be out of date again.
Like goddamn really EDD? How the fuck am I supposed to side by side compare jobs then?
idarin ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:33:16 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I work for the government as a software developer. This painfully reminds me of some of the systems we maintain.
Hey, at least years ago it turns out they upgraded a few of them from Classic ASP to .NET 2.0 - while changing absolutely nothing about how the interfaces looked or worked because god forbid we have to retrain the users that have worked there since the mainframes were in business.
What I don't get is why the IRS doesn't have an online payment system or one where you can check what's left on your payment plan! I called every couple of months just to see what the balanced owed was and waited on hold for over 15 minute each time! It's 2016! Why isn't there an online system for this?!?!?
The US Army makes all enlisted soldiers take online courses in order to advance in rank. Now imagine this clusterfuck of shit on the website we have to use to do it. Imagine the course taking days at a time to complete. Imagine some parts not saving progress or not loading properly causing you to have to refresh the page and lose everything. And no fucking presidential candidate has said or proposed to do shit about this.
In my experience in the military all my government passwords required a length between 10 to 16 characters, at least one capital, one lower case, one number, one symbol, must start with a letter, no consecutive characters, and cannot have been used as your last 3 passwords. It also expires in 3 months
Also, highlighted or underlined words in a different color, which, upon clicking, you find was never a link and was simply colored/underlined for emphasis.
I was looking at the New Zealand immigration website (because Trump) and I was blown away by how amazing it looks. We could NEVER have this in America!
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:44:59 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
EraYaN ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:44:18 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
And you are in no need of money. Government jobs are not the highest paying. As contractors sometimes.
For everyone complaining about government websites, check out 18F and the TTS Office of Acquisitions. They're making real changes towards how US government websites look and are purchased.
mwmwmwmwmmdw ยท 1039 points ยท Posted at 15:05:45 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
this is also the websites of about 95% of the military surplus stores in my area that do online shopping
WID_Call_IT ยท 352 points ยท Posted at 17:21:39 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is about 100% of websites we have to use in the military so the surplus stores are just modelling their source.
However, the recruiting websites for the branches are super modern and full of motivational pictures. Probably built on a contract instead of in-house.
[deleted] ยท 103 points ยท Posted at 18:25:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Funding is separate of course. The recruitment websites are handled by advertising agencies.
WID_Call_IT ยท 65 points ยท Posted at 18:29:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Hence what I said. If the military was hands-on, the recruiting websites would be down for a week every other month for maintenance and would require Internet Explorer 6 or lower. Unauthorized certificates on all other browsers. To get my TAP classes done at home I had to load it up in Microsoft Edge and use their "Load in Internet Explorer" option. It's ridiculous.
JoeM5952 ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 18:43:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Like DTS with the terrible java issues it has. Same for Arrows but the requires IE in compatibility mode and a terrible java setup.
alamuki ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 21:36:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
"You have an unsigned DTS document waiting for you."
"You need to upgrade your Java to run this program."
"You need an administrator to run this program. Please contact your help desk."
"You need to submit a work order to request this service."
"Thanks for updating your Java!" (48-72 hours, calculated in work days, weekends don't count)
"Welcome to DTS, we have upgraded our website. Please update your Java"
WID_Call_IT ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:43:07 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
DTS must stand for Don't Try Shit because I felt like if I moved the mouse it wouldn't load.
DrunkleDick ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 02:55:22 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The trick is to use it when nobody else is. Once the US East Coast wakes up you're fucked. I realized this in Germany when I could easily submit travel tickets in the morning but after lunch the website turned to shit.
Wafflesarepancakesv2 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:30:54 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
DTS? Leaveweb with its damn gradkell db sign makes me want to throw my keyboard out the window every time I have to go find a different computer just to submit leave.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:32:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Lol damn sorry. I did my TAP on base and never had to deal with that craziness.
WID_Call_IT ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:35:03 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I was a joint base and they tried to schedule every single one of my classes on the other base when my base had the classes too. I elected to do it online because fuck that spaghetti bowl.
ChainsawSnuggling ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:02:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I spent almost a week trying to complete my computer based training. Most of that was reloading crashed modules.
WID_Call_IT ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:07:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Ah, so you need a CBT about how to get ADLS working properly?
ChainsawSnuggling ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:25:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
No, a PowerPoint briefing will suffice. I'll need it to go a good 30 minutes past the point where I'm considering suicide to escape the brief though, so that way we can head right into the suicide prevention brief.
WID_Call_IT ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:40:59 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
To piggy back off what /u/ChainsawSnuggling said, we need an excessively long PowerPoint presentation on how to get ADLS working followed by suicide prevention and a group SAPR brief.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:27:29 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
WID_Call_IT ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 13:30:08 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I've seen regular websites go down for maintenance before. Usually it's for a few hours during non-peak time. Never have I ever seen entire swaths of websites (aside from torrent sites) go down for a week or longer and then the down time gets extended. That is unique to the government, I'd say.
breakyourfac ยท 28 points ยท Posted at 18:27:29 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The god damn PORTAL IS NEVER FUCKING UP.
Like oh hey you've got to complete this CBT by cob and it's already 1400 on Friday BUT THE PORTAL WON'T FUCKING WORK
WID_Call_IT ยท 19 points ยท Posted at 18:31:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Preaching to the pastor at this point.
MilPDS sites went down for a week just a few days before my final-out. I had to run around the base getting signatures to make sure I wasn't delayed. Like hell I was going to let them fuck with my terminal leave.
breakyourfac ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:50:18 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I should be doing that in about a year, so fucking excited lmao. Already counting down the days & learning the "don't give. A fuck" terminal attitude
WID_Call_IT ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:42:31 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I was in FIGMO status for a good month before I left. Best feeling in the world. Good luck to you, brother.
breakyourfac ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:50:46 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I should be doing that in about a year, so fucking excited lmao. Already counting down the days & learning the "don't give. A fuck" terminal attitude
Thomas_work ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:48:45 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I'd rather have that than a portal where you have to click around 30 times to finish one request.
This portal is where we're supposed to move into because it's "modern"...
before it took 3 actions. now it takes 30.
herrsmith ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:22:09 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I would be incredibly surprised if any of those military sites were built in-house. Almost all building of things is done by contract. The problem is that too many people have a say, resulting in a terrible product, and it's so painful to get another one built that it remains until it is literally unusable.
KuntaStillSingle ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:24:17 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Sometimes a website will be high speed, but in a 2000s bloated as fuck, interactive video kind of way so it turns out garbage on most government internet regardless.
wrightmf ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:57:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Looks kinda like CHESS...
CMaldoror ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:19:55 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Which ones?
WID_Call_IT ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:39:01 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Which what? Recruiting websites? Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps
chaos0510 ยท 22 points ยท Posted at 17:21:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Pretty much every gun and knife site ever
mwmwmwmwmmdw ยท 17 points ยท Posted at 17:41:52 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
big box guns shops and those with people working there under 40 have good sites but any gun shop owned and operated baby boomers on a rural area looks like its from 1996
chaos0510 ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 17:45:05 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly. All the local bodyshops in my town have websites that look like they were made on Geocities by a 7 year old autistic child
AATroop ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:50:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, well that explains /u/The_Crass-Beagle_Act
chaos0510 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 17:54:14 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Sorry, that reference just wooshed over my head
HeimrArnadalr ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:08:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It's a reference to This guy's comment.
chaos0510 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:35:09 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Thanks. I'm an idiot
AATroop ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:56:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It's OK.
Tier_1_Masturbator ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:14:24 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly what I thought when seeing the huge list on the left.
"How many categories of product should we have on the main page?"
"All of them."
TheWeekdn ยท 46 points ยท Posted at 17:02:35 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Also includes craigslist and niche artisanal shops
bigfashionmeme ยท 26 points ยท Posted at 17:32:04 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Craigslist can't change their website though.
astroGamin ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 17:33:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
why?
bigfashionmeme ยท 43 points ยท Posted at 17:34:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
people have been using it for years, even middle aged and old people use it a lot, if they updated it people would get mad
[deleted] ยท 70 points ยท Posted at 17:53:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
tbh craigslist has very easy to navigate and clean ui so I don't really think they need a rebrand
MrAwwesome ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 17:56:15 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They change little stuff every once in a while. It's a lot easier to find a specific car for example now than it was five years ago.
seanlax5 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 22:26:22 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They added Open Street Maps. Was a fantastic addition that most users aren't even aware of.
-VismundCygnus- ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:02:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Their website and UI is super, super ugly and outdated though. It is possible that they could make it look nicer while also keeping the simplicity of usability. Intuitiveness and a nice looking website are not mutually exclusive traits.
cliffotn ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 22:23:35 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
But - why?
Sure it's ugly, but 100% easy to use and fully functional. They almost have zero competition, the few ads they charge for (most are free), are super cheap. They serve folks in over 570 cities, with just a few dozen employees.
Of course they could make it an astonishingly gorgeous website, but there'd be a cost - and the users would likely end up paying more - possibly ads that are now free would have to be paid for.
technobrendo ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:25:33 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Preach brotha!
e_z_p_z_ ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 05:03:27 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It looks just like reddit
pgrily ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 18:58:00 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Younger guy here--I'd be really annoyed if they changed it much because it's really fucking simple to navigate and doesn't have any bloat. A few small tweaks maybe, but the layout is perfect.
flameoguy ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:57:44 on December 22, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Agreed. The layout is fine, any attempt to modernize it would most likely just make it bloated and hard to navigate.
celestiaequestria ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:32:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I mean, remember two years ago when Reddit had a functional mobile site and choosing to sort comments by "New" in mobile didn't just try and ram you into the front page or beat you over the head with a crappy app?
Craigslist is a clean, functional site that cares more about being able to scroll through pages easily than having a shiny look. The second they change it to look like every-other site, half of their users will be confused and leave.
UCanRunButUCantGlide ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:55:26 on January 15, 2017 ยท (Permalink)
Craigslist is so popular because it has just a simple design. It's one of its main features and in my opinion way better than similar sites with more modern design like kijiji.
Metro42014 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:15:44 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Craigslist's ethos is to only make changes that are necessary, or actually improve things.
I mean, look at the interface of Reddit. It's pretty damn simple too.
While I like the content on The Verge's website, can we just organize that shit in a list please? I don't need the funky boxes and shit, really, it doesn't enhance my experience, it's just a technical/design circlejerk.
Now get off my lawn.
Jms1078 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 05:44:57 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, except your password must be 39 characters long, must contain an equal amount of numbers, symbols, upper, and lower case letters.
You must change your password every 5th hour, and if you are 20 seconds late your password resets.
Also, you have to email customer support from your account to retrieve your new password.
Val_Hallen ยท 297 points ยท Posted at 15:05:48 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot that IT will occasionally block .gov or .mil websites at random.
[deleted] ยท 93 points ยท Posted at 16:47:02 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Www.savingryansprivates.mil.xxx
stanfan114 ยท 33 points ยท Posted at 20:01:28 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts
CaffeinatedGuy ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 04:14:27 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It's broke.
wraithcube ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 18:36:03 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Didn't ICANN set TLDs as reserved domain names back in 2013 to avoid this? How this was ever allowed as a standard is beyond me.
antaryon ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 23:58:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is the organization that thinks ".motorcycles" is a good TLD.
Metro42014 ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 01:28:48 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
http://endless.horse/
iotku ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 04:03:51 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Not bad.
pete404 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:43:15 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That's a good one
alamuki ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 21:39:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
And Wikipedia, those bastards. Wiki leaks, I understand (still stupid but since secret docs do end up there it could fuck a lot of stupid people up), but Wikipedia blocking is just dumb.
gloopyboop ยท 455 points ยท Posted at 15:34:15 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
the government still believes that the internet is just a fad.
bogidyboy ยท 317 points ยท Posted at 15:46:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I forgot the source, but there was a Supreme Court meeting where one of the justices referred to Netflix as "Netflick" and seemed to not understand what Net Neutrality actually is
tidderreddittidderre ยท 243 points ยท Posted at 16:04:07 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The Supreme Court is unfortunately about 3 decades older than the median person
Pyll ยท 31 points ยท Posted at 19:43:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That's a good thing. I wouldn't want some 20 year old graduate to be in the position.
iciale ยท 125 points ยท Posted at 20:17:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
No one said they had to be 20, just that half of them being 68+ blows in a day and age of technological innovation and change
bobosuda ยท 31 points ยท Posted at 22:57:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Because the only other option is someone 10+ years younger than the median age?
Pretty sure there's an acceptable compromise somewhere inbetween an average age of early 20s and an average age of late 60s.
MadaCheeb ยท 49 points ยท Posted at 15:56:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
TBH, I'm not even totally sure what it is.
benjaminiscariot ยท 227 points ยท Posted at 15:58:38 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
u ain't making the laws tho
I_ate_a_milkshake ยท 41 points ยท Posted at 16:56:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
neither is the supreme Court /pedantry
AnExoticLlama ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 17:12:48 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
If their ruling is this they sorta are making laws.
I_ate_a_milkshake ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 17:31:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
but strictly speaking they don't create laws. that's why it was pedantic.
Strong__Belwas ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:25:22 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
what laws re: the internet have reached the supreme court
WildTurkey81 ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:45:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I like it when a child comment has more karma than the parent, since the trend tends to be that the parent has about 20% more than the child, but this has about 500% of it's parent's karma, and that excites me.
bdavbdav ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 12:40:58 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It's the simple things.
WildTurkey81 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:30:54 on December 21, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
for your helf
WildTurkey81 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:30:54 on December 21, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
for your helf
bogidyboy ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 16:48:03 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
As a person who got more karma than me for a comment you made in response to someone's response to my comment, I assure you I'm mean-mugging the shit out of this comment.
cerebrus21 ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 16:50:23 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
u ain't making the laws tho
Strong__Belwas ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 17:25:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
both comments were pretty bad
bogidyboy ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:42:57 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Ok
Fatalchemist ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:59:15 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You don't know him!
ShowALK32 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:34:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh hey, it's the Fat Al Chemist
bogidyboy ยท 36 points ยท Posted at 16:14:10 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Here's my possibly-oversimplification of it: ISPs shouldn't be able to control what content their subscribers see on the internet, which websites load fastest, or which websites do/don't count towards your data plan.
MadaCheeb ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 16:24:51 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Ok, so to put it even more simply, it's giving ISP's even more power to fuck with my browsing?
bogidyboy ยท 38 points ยท Posted at 16:36:35 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is what the internet would look like without net neutrality.
To be fair, that's more of a "worst case scenario" and I find it hard to believe it would ever actually get that bad, but it's still worth fighting against!
cain8708 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 16:48:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I feel that doesnt really tell me what net neutrality is. It felt like what the market is already doing now, higher costs lower services.
[deleted] ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 17:00:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Currently isp's provide you a certain mb/sec (or max mbs per month) . You use those to travel wherever you want on the net. no site is favoured. If a site is slower than others, its because the servers of the site are bad/lacking, not because the isp is fucking with it.
No net neutrality means the isp can go to website x and demand a certain amount of cash, otherwise it will throttle the site. It means the isps (which have no competition in many parts) can kill the competition in every other service that relies on the net.
cain8708 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:51:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
While i agree thats bad, that doesnt solve the other end of the problem. Many people can only get internet from one or maybe two companies. Those companies charge huge amounts of money for internet, before we even get to the neutrality part, because they are the only ones who can provide that service.
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:39:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
net neutrality stops the abusive markets from spreading to every other net related ones.
cain8708 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:08:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I hope that once we dont have to worry about net neutrality we can work on these huge monopolies than run access to the internet itself. I know thats a whole different ballgame and people will have their opinion on what is too much government interference. But in some places in major cities for speeds above 5mbps there is only one company.
DoverBoys ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:01:48 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Net Neutrality is the concept of an open internet. If you get internet service, being neutral means you can open your browser and go to any site you want. The linked example is what cable is, not neutral. Let's say you wanted to visit Reddit in a non-neutral internet. You can't, unless you pay extra monthly to your ISP.
cain8708 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:12:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Thank you. I scrolled through it and figured it was what could happen if net neutrality didnt happen. I just think it would be better if in that link they also tell you info instead of the cheap scare tactic.
ours ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:31:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
He's partially wrong. They won't technically forbid you to go to Reddit but they can make it slower than other sites to view. Then you can pay have have faster access to Reddit (i.e. normal speed in a net neutral Internet).
cain8708 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:18:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Kinda like throttling? Only instead of it being the data cap being the unit of measure, itll be the customer's cash.
ours ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:17:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly like throttling. You pay for a big pipe, the total flow stays the same but Youtube/Netflix or whatever are artificially slowed down unless you pay up.
It actually requires effort from them to throttle these specific sites.
cain8708 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:18:22 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I guess they figured if it worked for phones, why not internet? Its amazing how much companies will work to make extra money, but will make the customer work to prove they are owed money.
terminator3456 ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 16:18:14 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
"Net Neutrality" is such a laughably Orwellian name for it.
bogidyboy ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 16:22:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
What should it be called?
terminator3456 ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 16:26:42 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Government Forcing ISPs To Not Discriminate Pricing Based On Bandwidth Usage is more accurate.
bogidyboy ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 16:29:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I fell asleep halfway through reading that.
[deleted] ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 16:29:24 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Not really. Net Neutrality refers to discrimination in source of bandwidth, not amount. Like data caps are consistent with net neutrality
AshTheGoblin ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 16:59:44 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Rolls right off the tongue
veggiter ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:02:05 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Well you're not wrong in that it's a catchy name that simplifies what it entails, but you are totally off the mark in terms of Orwell's stuff and how it relates to power and misinformation, which is really the crux of what he was talking about.
[deleted] ยท 19 points ยท Posted at 16:29:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Without net neutrality, your ISP can make websites like Netflix (for example) virtually unusable because they want you to use their own streaming service. And if you want to use Netflix, they'll charge extra for it.
In theory, ISPs will be able to turn the internet into an a la carte service where you pay more or less, depending on the websites you want to use.
Net neutrality basically says your ISP must treat all internet traffic equally.
MadaCheeb ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 16:30:38 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh! Ok, so Net Neutrality is a good thing. I think I get it now. Thanks all for your help!
kipjak3rd ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 16:53:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
yep. ISPs want to sell it as having 'fast lanes' for certain sites. in reality its discrimination for unfavourable sites/content/etc, netflix as an example, and privilege for those that can pay extra to not be throttled(stifled/controlled).
data is data, charging differently on what are ultimately baseless reasons gives ISPs an opportunity to create control over your overall internet usage. its a slippery slope
ShowALK32 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 17:35:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
IIRC there was a lot more stuff in the Net Neutrality proposal that gave way too much power to government over this stuff so that's why it was so divisive.
slowurxvt ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 16:38:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
My mom watches it every day and still calls it "Netflex" lol
bogidyboy ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 16:44:56 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
My girlfriend's co-worker calls Uber "the Hoober". She also says Ronald "REEgan".
ticketbutt ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:05:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Is she from Minnesota?
bogidyboy ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:13:15 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
lol I always imagined her as being from Minnesota but I'm pretty sure she was raised in California, in one of our "cow towns". She comes from a very religious family.
gchase723 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:47:02 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Normies tear down this wall, REEE!
Metro42014 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:03:15 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Isn't it McConnell that said he doesn't use email?
In 2016, doesn't fucking use EMAIL?!
Strong__Belwas ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 17:24:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
so someone doesn't know the name of a tv company, or was uncertain about the definition of an ambiguous term? who cares
DerNubenfrieken ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 17:32:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The supreme courts job is sort of to know the definition of ambiguous terms.
Strong__Belwas ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 17:55:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
their job is to rule on cases
DerNubenfrieken ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:22:13 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Uh yes. And to do that you need to know what ambiguous terms actually mean, thats basically what law is based on.
Strong__Belwas ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:28:44 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
do you expect the justices of the supreme court to know the ins and outs of literally everything? they're not superbeings, especially about a term that probably had never been written until like 7 years ago.
again, what cases have they ruled on where this has mattered?
Vbarb ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:07:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Every one.
Strong__Belwas ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:09:04 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
where the topic of "net neutrality" has been at the center of deliberation
the_person ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:42:31 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It's their job to understand this stuff
Strong__Belwas ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:56:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
no, it's their job to rule on cases. when has any case with the term "net neutrality" reached the scotus?
the_person ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:22:35 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They should do their research in order to make sure they understand what is being decided.
Strong__Belwas ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:38:08 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
agreed.
baymenintown ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 18:58:09 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
just a bunch of tubes and the tubes are getting too full
tgp1994 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:06:08 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is why we don't need the FCC, we already have the Federal Tube Commission.
thapol ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:10:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Close! But it's not nearly as fun (awful) of a picture as just 'gobments stupid.'
DC is terrifyingly slow on the tech side, but that's because we keep getting reps that might as well be Amish as far as technology is concerned.
Because of this, we typically end up with entranced tech companies (and people) that are themselves practically archaic in their design, structure, and implementation. They'll consistently get the contracts because they've consistently gotten contracts (Stupid? Y'damn skippy it is.)
A concerted push to resolve those issues has been made by the most recent administration! (It's how I got one of my jobs there) But it means dick if those agencies don't get the needed coordination from the state level (coughACA*cough), or (see last point).
Unlike private companies, most government agencies don't have the luxury to just kill everything with fire from orbit, and start anew. Backwards compatibility is needed, and 'comparability' typically means the following scenario:
The amount of extra work this creates is mind-numbingly retarding, and the agencies that can do this kind of work, and do it well, cost too much. Which leads me to my last point...
Pretty much every public service agency only gets enough to maintain themselves. Does it matter that the long-term maintenance will cost more because of a shitty & archaic system? Nope! Because that's not how budgeting works in the public sector*.
Which causes their overall ability to do things at the rate of technology to fall off as quickly as technology advances. As this spiral continues, people lose faith in said agency, and its funding is continually restricted... repeat ad naseum.
TL;DR: Want a working gob'ment? Gotta pay for it (or at least make sure it gets more than just the minimum to get by).
*: Feel free to correct me on this; just what I could see as a lowly contractor
magnora7 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:24:42 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Nah they have teams doing messaging and PR on forums and stuff so it's pretty legit now I think
BuddhistSagan ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:42:10 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Compare government websites in States where they don't want you to be helped vs government websites in places like the United Kingdom... Its almost as if governments that have shitty websites do it on purpose
PfftNope ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:40:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Well yeah look at the deparment of defense's website
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:29:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
What is that?
Hullabalooga ยท 1355 points ยท Posted at 15:34:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Created all for the low low tax-payer price of $850,000,000!
[deleted] ยท 529 points ยท Posted at 17:16:15 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
swyx ยท 163 points ยท Posted at 17:50:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Seriously speaking, why do these govt departments not give a fuck about upgrading? These are essential services for citizens and the ux is terrrible
angrylawyer ยท 85 points ยท Posted at 19:21:11 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Boss, our database is 17 years old I'd like to upgrade it.
Ok, what's wrong with it?
Well technically it still works, but it's so outdated I can barely find documentation for it. We can't upgrade these dozen other services because they all require the newer database version. And who knows how much longer the hardware will hold on. If the hardware dies it's going to be a nightmare trying to restore it because nothing else we've got can run OS '98. We've also grown beyond our original expected usage for this hardware so it's pretty slow.
But it's working fine now?
for now.
Ok, so how big of a project would this be?
Since we're 6 major versions behind, we won't be able to upgrade in place. We'll need to purchase two more database servers, a new san, the new database software, operating system, and renew our support contract. My estimate is about $X00,000 and 2-3 months to complete it.
Hmm...but it's still working now? I don't think we've got time for this this year. Maybe we can get it on the 2017 schedule.
...but in 2015 you said we'd get it on the 2016 schedule.
[deleted] ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 02:58:17 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
Virgindognotreally ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 08:07:08 on December 22, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You missed the part where they are working for the government
Grep2grok ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 06:11:25 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
puh-lease! We run mission-critical, life-and-death software that was last updated in 1995. The client only runs in a VT500 emulator and the server runs on OpenVMS (EOL'd before my high schooler was born)
goldishblue ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:28:07 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
[deleted] ยท 189 points ยท Posted at 18:00:06 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Where is the impetus for them to do so?
If you're a private company and your website looks awful people will assume your company is run badly and business will suffer. Government has no competition in many areas and therefore there is no economic pressure to upgrade, because departments would rather spend the money on obscene overtime payments for staff than a good website.
I work at a university in a country where the state is involved in the universities, and the private colleges (which are considered less prestigious) overwhelmingly have better websites. Quite simply there is more pressure on them to have them.
Oxyfire ยท 42 points ยท Posted at 18:41:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
and then you have punkbuster Who's website looked like something from 2000 up until a few years ago and I'm pretty sure they're still used as an anti-cheat in some games. I only know this because BF3 had all sorts of problems with punkbuster and the solution often involved getting some file directly from punkbuster's website. Granted, at that point I didn't need their website to tell me they sucked.
Also restaurant websites. Restaurant websites everywhere with horrible layouts. With impossible to find menus and hours....
Captain_Vegetable ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 19:01:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The averages restaurant site is also in Flash, and once you finally find the menu you'll get dishes and prices last updated in 2005.
seditious_commotion ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 19:10:46 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I honestly think there is a massive market in this. I want to start going around to every local restaurant with a shitty or nonexistent Web page and offering them my services.
I can't even count the number of times I haven't eaten somewhere because no menu was available on the internet, or the menu didn't have pricing information.
It blows my mind so few restaurants actually have updated and working websites. Chains tend to have decent sites, because their parent companies aren't idiots that think it's optional, but I'd guess only around 33% of my local restaurants have a functional site.
Maybe they are too cheap for it to be viable and they will all turn me down but I am starting to try it in Jan. 2017. There are so many restaurants in my city that I can't imagine at least a couple wouldn't take me up... and then I can use that to advertise/pressure the others.
Captain_Vegetable ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 19:23:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Good luck! Offer a few decent templates and make the site Google and mobile friendly and you should get takers. Restaurants understandably hate to spend money, but showing them their site doesn't even work on a phone should open some wallets.
TheWKDsAreOnMeMate ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 20:20:39 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Restaurants are moving their online presence over to Facebook, that's why you see a lot of defunct websites. Not only is it free, younger people tend to scout for a good place to eat this way, plus the page can be 'liked' so they can keep in contact with customers.
seditious_commotion ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:25:00 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That does make sense... but I don't think most people check Facebook first for restaurants.
I know that personally I need to see a menu WITH prices before I go to a place I've never been. I am obviously not talking about fine dining here... but casual places should have that stuff up imo.
We will see! It is definitely my plan to make a little extra money in the New Year. I think I have a good enough sales pitch I can convince a lot it is needed. Especially once I have done one for a competitor/another local place.
TheWKDsAreOnMeMate ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 20:32:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Fyi Facebook has a 'view menu' option for restaurants. But yeah good luck, still themajority of restaurants have their own websites, I just think the industry is moving to a social media type online presence (and that's only the more forward thinking establishments) there's still money to be made.
platoprime ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:07:15 on December 24, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Why shouldn't fine dining have posted prices?
Aaod ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:23:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I set the bar so low that all they have to have is an address and hours they are open and large portions of them fail at even that and you are expecting up to date prices?
BojanglesJohnson ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:02:06 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Grub hub
TimothyGonzalez ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:53:18 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah except behind every terrible website is a terrible business owner who doesn't want to invest in things working properly.
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:29:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Ah, Punkbuster, there's a name I haven't heard in awhile.
53bvo ยท 25 points ยท Posted at 18:29:02 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The government websites in my country (Netherlands) actually look quite neat most of the time. The military also has some of the best looking commercials (although they do have competitors on the job market).
Most people, municipalities and government departments have some pride in what they do and want to show that through their websites.
Mzsickness ยท 48 points ยท Posted at 18:58:44 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Our Military built a fucking video game. And to be honest it wasn't half bad.
RavarSC ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 19:24:59 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It's actually pretty awesome, I learned the basics of first aid through that lol
McGuineaRI ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 20:09:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
America's Army? There's a game now called Squad on Steam that is 1000x better than that but it's the same idea. People actually work as a team there. I played a lot of America's Army when I was younger and Squad really is a lot better. If you like one you'll love the other.
[deleted] ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 21:54:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Americans Army looked like exactly the type of game I was looking for when I was a kid but the signup process was so strange that I was worried I was actually signing myself into a binding contract with the army lol
McGuineaRI ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:00:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That is super funny. You missed out kid! Make up for it and get squad.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:18:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It's all fun and games until you get arrested for going AWOL!
RavarSC ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:23:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I'll check it out at some point but I've been pretty burnt out of FPS's other than overwatch the last few years
CannedNoodlez ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 19:04:08 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh our military commercials in the US are pretty good looking.
https://youtu.be/tYrBSTBHCS4
FrostyGrass ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 19:41:57 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That really is one of the best recruiting commercials ever done.
RonnieReagansGhost ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:55:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
There's a better one I think for the navy where boats are everywhere and they play that one disturbed song
FrostyGrass ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:56:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah the Navy is definitely on top of their game for these videos!
mki401 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:46:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Much harder to convince people to sign up to be bullet sponges with a shitty commercial.
shizzler ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:14:40 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Same in the UK
disguy2k ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:38:39 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
If you can get people to do all the work online themselves you will not need as many cs reps to deal with the general public. Dealing face to face vs a simple online form to get what the person needs is much more efficient.
oryes ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:52:38 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Bingo, instead of spending the money on annoying actual work, they can just give it to themselves.
an0dize ยท -3 points ยท Posted at 18:18:04 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Dude what are you even talking about. All government is completely altruistic, and the free market and private companies can't improve anything other than their own pocketbooks. This is Reddit man, come on. /s
Necroskowitz ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 18:32:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Did you know YOUR government is wasting upwards of hundreds of YOUR tax dollars on frivolous pornography on the internet!? Money that could go to the military! I and my colleagues will shut down the government to stop this runaway spending. Is re-elected six times.
bike_bike ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:45:14 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Try getting the senate to approve the funding for it when there is a literal pornography war that must be waged.
lurkymclurkyson ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:11:20 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Actually in the past few years there has been a push to update sites to be more modern. You have issues with 508 compliance and govies who fight over control and what technologies to use. It's.. Fun...
I've been involved in this for years.
willpie ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:15:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Why, it's almost like one of the two major political parties is deliberately starving them of funds, so it can make political hay crowing about the incompetence of anyone who'd deign to work for the government!
natziel ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:17:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I work for a non-profit, not the government, but the problem we had (and we're spending a ton of money to fix now) is that the backend ends up going way over budget, which forces the frontend budget to be cut.
You don't ever see the backend, but it's way more important for it to work well than the frontend. An ugly frontend turns some users away, but it's not a security issue, and you can still do what you need to do.
EveryNightIWatch ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 02:55:49 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Cost.
I was a part of a major project to overall the most popular website in my state. Price tag was $450,000 just in services. Probably $1,500,000 for the servers/licensing.
At that level of pricing, you have to have your state legislature approve it.
Then there's just internal bureaucracy and vendors who make terrible products targeted at the government. You know your DMV's website where you can pay traffic tickets or other fees? That's actually run by an external vendor, who gets a slice of the transaction cost, and makes a fucking killing - why isn't it mobile friendly? Why doesn't it use modern UX/UI? Because the vendor don't give a fuck and to change the requirements would mean another act of your legislature. Any website "run by your state" that collects fees is likely actually ran by the same terrible vendor.
smokeyrobot ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:15:23 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Money and regulations. The cry from conservatives about regulations isn't some imaginary concept. Regulations for disabled people and old hardware force updates to be very expensive and cumbersome.
Also the government favors utility over aesthetics because it is cheaper. They also have little expertise in IT areas and not just one source for the work. So each agency or department has little silos if they are lucky of IT people to do the work.
jvnk ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:31:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Depends on the site and agency involved. There are a number of nice federal-level sites in the US:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/
https://www.federalregister.gov/
https://www.vets.gov/ (this one in particular is the result of a miracle - the VA had over 1200 websites at one point apparently, they've since consolidated most of them into this portal)
smokeybehr ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:41:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It depends. If the agency/jurisdiction is poor, they won't have anyone to update things, or it'll be put on a back burner. Some jurisdictions use the same template for everything (State of California, I'm looking at you bastards in CTA), no matter what the agency is, and therefore it's the same shit across all the sites.
The agency I work for migrated to SharePoint last year, and it's improved everything on both the Internet and Intranet sides. We have 2 people working on it part time, and had 1 full-time contract person working on it before it launched. It's a pretty site and fairly easy to navigate.
weasel-like ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:08:43 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They don't need to care. Government can be inherently inefficient and not "lose business". They get money each year either way.
Metro42014 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:32:06 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You know how people complain about government costing too much money?
Know what good internal IT resources cost? (hint: the answer is a whole bunch). Even worse, bad external IT resources also cost a shit ton, and give zero fucks about the quality of the shit they create.
AlexaWikipediaSmegma ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 17:51:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It depends. I got paid $200 to be in a focus group for some feature on some government website. We were one of several focus groups and they ran 40 hours a week. The website was total shit. Could have paid me to do it with less than the cost of a couple focus group sessions.
itijara ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:09:48 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Made my first website ever while working for the government. Can confirm.
TechniCruller ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:07:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Same.
As soon as I saw the RFP pricing returns I knew I was in the wrong building.
GainInsaiyan ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:55:24 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
As someone who's working a govt website, not all companies do this. Some sites are archaic as hell because they need to be accessible on specific machines and networks, and most of those machines are running Windows 7 and have unsupported IE browsers. It's hell to develop for modern browsers while also accommodating for the old machines that are in use during deployment that can't run modern CSS and whatnot very quickly
ours ยท 33 points ยท Posted at 18:26:13 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
2 project directors, 5 project managers, 8 different flavors of "architects", an army of analysts, 2 testers and 50 developers from the lowest bidder India can offer.
KingOfFlan ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 20:10:24 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
My buddy is setting up the welfare and benefits system in Kentucky for a 250mil contract and this is exactly right.
Metro42014 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:36:23 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Jesus Christ.
For $250 million I could make some fucking beautiful software, instead of the fucking steaming dumpster fire that they'll end up with.
ours ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:27:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Honorable mention goes to big old private industry bringing in those ex-IBM/Oracle guys 'cause this is a big project and we need people with experience in a big project so let's top load the crap of it and neglect the people who actually know execution.
Countless hours of entertainment hearing a buddy of mine tell me about the multi-million dollar (tens of USD millions and nowhere near completion) project he's in. He himself knows he's a very expensive paper-pusher with some meaningless title. Plus it's private sector so less sad than welfare wasting millions and helping contractors and politicians first, the taxpayer... maybe later.
seditious_commotion ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 19:11:31 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
FTFY
Metro42014 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:30:15 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Fucking consulting companies.
The_Flatest_Bush ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 02:49:49 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Not sure if you are joking, but that guess was pretty darn close
deflateddoritodinks ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:43:00 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Politicians friends kick back $849,000,000 to politicians.
andrewia ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:21:19 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Can confirm, worked for a state government web host. We charged hundreds a month and something like $20/GB of data transfer.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:57:47 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
A genius in top management contracted the job to a company. Company was like "yeah, for you, $850 million"
The two characters are brothers.
Nepotism.
ZNasT ยท 116 points ยท Posted at 16:03:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Some of my passwords at the gov need to be EXACTLY 8 characters and changed every 3 months without reusing them. I've had to develop a password system based on the current date to avoid losing my mind.
knitedeth ยท 73 points ยท Posted at 17:46:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Or they go way overboard and require a 15 character (I guess 16 was just too much) password with 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, a number, and a symbol from their list. Cannot be the same as your previous 8 passwords, cannot contain repeats, and their system decides if it contains a dictionary word or not. Must be changed every 60 days, and on day 61 (including weekends and holidays) you're locked out and have to call support to reset it.
ZNasT ยท 47 points ยท Posted at 18:01:20 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh god, the support desk calls. Do they want people to keep all their passwords in a plain text document on their desktop? Because it feels that way sometimes.
53bvo ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 18:35:57 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The IT department where I work actually advised to write the password down if you can't remember it. Which is easy due to all the restrictions they require.
flameoguy ยท 26 points ยท Posted at 19:13:43 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
sticky note on the monitor
danrodriguez7647 ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 23:52:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
There's nothing wrong with storing passwords on paper provided the physical security of the paper is reasonable.
SaffellBot ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:37:32 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
In reality your password is whatever the requirements to reset your password are.
TaylorSwift2015 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 23:08:00 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I think I know what website you're talking about. Does it also have an option to log in with a CAC card yet, when you do use a CAC card, you're saved no additional steps?
knitedeth ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 06:01:58 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That was just the frontpage for AF Portal to login and get my DD-214
TaylorSwift2015 ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 06:03:40 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yup. Army Knowledge Online is the exact same thing.
knitedeth ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 06:17:45 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
AKO can kiss my ass!!! I had to do Army TAP since joint base. Not only did it crash almost every day, now 2 months post-214, I'm getting at least 3 emails a day to reset my password. I can't find an opt-out for it either.
TaylorSwift2015 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 06:32:33 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
hahaahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahaha
Thank god I'm out!
Anyways, just set up a mail filter to send it strait to the trash can.
knitedeth ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 06:55:28 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I thought the same...I'm out...I'm done...they can't do shit to me now. AKO came back with "gotcha bitch".
I would filter out the emails, but now I just have to know how long they'll keep sending it.
DatOpenSauce ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:46:47 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
One of my banks won't let me have a password longer than 15 digits (or was it 16?). Like what the fuck man.
SaffellBot ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:38:06 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
For a while (like until 2014) my bank was 6-8 characters, letters and numbers only. No capitals.
DatOpenSauce ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:37:12 on December 21, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That is just something else. I'm guessing you could make an alright password with 8 characters and a clever combo of letters and numbers, but I'm not too sure.
d_b_work_account ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 20:14:10 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
00000001....00000002....00000003....
[deleted] ยท 84 points ยท Posted at 17:57:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot "This website is available from 9 AM until 5 PM, Monday through Friday. Please return later."
That's right, they went out of their way to program the website not to let anyone browse it during certain hours.
psyFungii ยท 31 points ยท Posted at 19:44:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is what I came to say. Down-time for maintenance is to be expected (if not every bloody day), but their web-servers need sleepy time.
Maybe they need to be unplugged so the cleaning lady can use her vacuum?
Dreamerlax ยท 26 points ยท Posted at 19:49:02 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Are you fucking kidding me
[deleted] ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 00:26:01 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Totally real and, as a web developer, absolutely mind boggling.
Websites by nature want to be up 24/7. You have to spend time and energy to deliberately keep people out based on the current time of day.
p0rtalGeek ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 06:43:06 on December 22, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Other web developer here, confuses me to no end. Seriously, it would take at least an hour for someone to code this kind of thing up. And probably more considering how old most government websites are and how primitive their code is.
llagerlof ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:45:43 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
No, it's real. I already saw it once.
Vbarb ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 19:36:35 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I hate this so much. One of the community colleges I went to did this. So I couldn't pull up my classes or change anything until Monday morning at 7 if I wanted to do anything on my account Friday night.
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 01:33:26 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You can't expect them to pay their servers overtime every day!!
mazu74 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 07:05:07 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh God my community college did that.
Why? Fucking why? I just got off work at midnight and all I wanted to do was just check my grades but nope! Apparently servers have to sleep overnight.
maciozo ยท 130 points ยท Posted at 15:26:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The UK government website actually seems pretty decent. So at least we have that going for us...
[deleted] ยท 77 points ยท Posted at 15:42:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
DatOpenSauce ยท 48 points ยท Posted at 17:44:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
http://gov.uk is the shit. Got their own sexy arse typeface too. And mmmm the driving license application form.. That is some good shit. Let's you provide your passport details to pull your passport image and put it on your license.
Benmjt ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 23:21:52 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
An exemplaryโand award-winningโwebsite. Something to be truly proud of.
draaakje ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:33:11 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yep. The Design of the Year award. It was referred to as "the Paul Smith of websites." Defo something to be proud of.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:40:12 on December 23, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
One of the better coalition decisions.
mrv3 ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 21:29:45 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Also the BBC taking archiving seriously is just amazing.
Not sure why but it seems like whenever a website changes whatever dark magic makes their sites run it also breaks the old webpages.
The BBC? Changes the magic and sure you won't get the fancy features but man atleast the pages work.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm
downvotesyndromekid ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:53:44 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah i thought so until I helped someone apply for a UK visa. Lots of vagueness and the helpline was outsourced to some 3rd party for profit, based somewhere which apparently had laws against taking the gobstopper out of your cake hole.
vidyagames ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 18:54:47 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Our Aussie ones are pretty good too. It seems like this starter pack only applies to North America.
draaakje ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 01:36:10 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Fun fact: the woman who headed the UX team at the (British) Government Digital Service now heads the Australian Digital Transformation Office.
SDGfdcbgf8743tne ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 21:30:02 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It's pretty much the only British government service that isn't a piece of shit. Well done those guys.
Lorry_Al ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:58:24 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
99% of council websites are stuck in 2005.
thestickystickman ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:23:53 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
My council's is pretty good
draaakje ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:38:18 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Manchester Council's is pretty good. As is Liverpool City Council's.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:42:08 on December 23, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Mine looks fine.
I've never seen a bad council website. Got an example?
mr_tony_blair ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:25:17 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is what happens when you put user needs first and actually test you shit on people.
Panzersaurus ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:40:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Fuck yeah. Was gonna say this. It was a fucking breeze when I applied for my british passport from New Zealand using that site. 10/10
therestlessgamer ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:03:18 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I once met a couple of people on the UK government payroll who worked on one of their many microservices. They're not doling out contracts to the best bidder but rather have over a dozen teams working on different aspects of web development like a modern conglomerate would.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:39:05 on December 23, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Even my local council website is modern and informative. Can't complain.
Gov.uk is really good, though. You can do so much without picking up a phone. Register to vote, tax your car, etc.
Takes literally 2 minutes to register to vote now. Very nice.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:19:34 on January 17, 2017 ยท (Permalink)
http://usa.gov/ has recently been refreshed and it too is decent.
FierceDeity_ ยท 102 points ยท Posted at 15:56:23 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Actually there's a standardization in progress
https://standards.usa.gov/getting-started/
bilbo_dragons ยท 79 points ยท Posted at 19:18:31 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Literally a government website starter pack.
Grep2grok ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 06:17:09 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
last update on their github repo's /src was 4 days ago. 18F is awesome!
mikenew02 ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 17:22:39 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Thanks Obama.
MrLangbyMippets ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 16:41:23 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That actually looks kind of nice...
Pats420 ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 16:48:43 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Even looks good on mobile
WorkToDoIHave ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 18:06:18 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The UK has a similar one, https://www.gov.uk/service-manual.
Elements here: http://govuk-elements.herokuapp.com/
Rainbowlemon ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 22:37:38 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
gov.uk is probably one of the best information website designs I've ever seen. I use it as a reference for any UX issues I come across in my own designs.
snowyday ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:46:52 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 02:38:55 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
For a minute there I thought that 18f was an 18 year old girl. I've been on reddit way too much
FierceDeity_ ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:50:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
18/f/cali?
Sorry, have not much idea about the which is which of american government agencies :D
jvnk ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:26:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
18F is new and pretty unique. They aren't really a government agency in the contemporary sense.
[deleted] ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 17:07:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
FierceDeity_ ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 17:58:40 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Well it's free to download, so practically everyone can use it.
And this thread says "Government website" starter pack, so it fits right in anyway.
I don't think it says anywhere "Only for federal level sites, state or municipal level keep ur fuckin hands off"
flameoguy ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:42:29 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Especially you, Congress of Ohio. If I see you buckeyes using these web standards, you'll be booted out of the union.
thestickystickman ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:24:53 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Wouldn't really miss them tbh
Juicewag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:20:38 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Ohio GA website isn't bad? I use it daily.
flameoguy ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 02:21:54 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The Ohio legislature site is pretty good. They must be stealing our federal standards.
War now!
Terrible_Storyteller ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:43:28 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Wow that's awesomely hilarious for me. My job is maintaining government websites that match the OP and I've slowly been updating them. The problem is I'm not a web developer and volunteered for the job to get out of my rut. I could actually use this. Thanks!
Silverlocks-frown ยท 96 points ยท Posted at 16:44:23 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Was really hoping OP would include this:
http://i.imgur.com/x6j9ahJ.png
knitedeth ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 18:27:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, that's an easy fix...just have your CSA install the new DoD VPN. Only takes about 3 months to get approved, then they need your laptop for at least a week, you get it back and nothing works...so they remote in and reinstall it (taking an hour or so). Now you're all set up, except the 16 character password that requires changing every 60 days (see rules above) and it only works with IE8, so now you have to get the retro-grade update....finally all done...what's that?!? A new VPN version is out and only works with IE9....repeat ad nauseam.
sadistmushroom ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 22:48:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
By the time you get the latest version you've been promoted (due to outstanding incompetence) and no longer need it
wra1th42 ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:47:29 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
lol so true, every military site.
truthfulfacade ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:29:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I die a little on the inside everytime I use a .mil site
dewhashish ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:26:17 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Like the site would even work on chrome.
utt73 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:14:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That's because most .mil sites create their own TLS cert instead of paying a CA. Browsers don't recognize the CA, because there isn't one, and toss this error.
Terrible_Storyteller ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:49:51 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Actually, they do have a CA. The problem is the cert most likely expired. The current people maintaining the site are not the people that made it and either don't know it's broken or are too lazy to update it
utt73 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:17:34 on December 22, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Or you could inspect the cert itself. They do not pay third party CA, was created internally. Cert expires 26 JAN 2019.
apolotary ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 15:56:45 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Add full/half-width character check bullshit and you got 80% of Japanese websites in 2016
Hooman_Super ยท 84 points ยท Posted at 14:46:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
*PoS Corporate website starter pack ๐ฆ
tidderreddittidderre ยท 113 points ยท Posted at 15:59:23 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
When you're a company with a 400 billion dollar market cap but you want that 90s aesthetic
StarDestinyGuy ยท 66 points ยท Posted at 16:24:59 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Good God
Michaelbama ยท 34 points ยท Posted at 16:28:18 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
fucking lol at the 'message to our shareholder' in 1984.
"our gain was 152 million this year. That sounds pretty good, but is actually mediocre"
tidderreddittidderre ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:45:40 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
huh turns out Warren Buffet was Immortan Joe this whole time
Euerfeldi ยท 30 points ยท Posted at 16:07:44 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Why are the links purple? WHY?
indoobitably ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 16:16:00 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
you went so deep you forgot you reached The End.
AnindoorcatBot ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 17:35:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
whys the message from warren a geico ad lol
FedoraWearingNegus ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 17:56:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They own it
517634 ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 17:45:03 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Seriously.. that's really confusing to me. I mean I know that built-in ads were once commonplace, but you figure that Geico's contract for that ad would have run out by now.
5mk ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 18:49:37 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They own Geico
raydio27 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:41:07 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They're advertising it because it's THEIR company. They're so big they literally OWN Geico.
ALLKAPSLIKEMFDOOM ยท 30 points ยท Posted at 16:07:56 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Hey I mean you don't build up that much money by commissioning expensive websites
[deleted] ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 16:17:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I drive by Buffet's house everyday. You don't get to be that rich by being showy.
meditate42 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:17:22 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yea he's a billionaire due to his frugal saving, not his earnings. Lot of people don't realize that.
Strong__Belwas ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:42:29 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
http://www.berkshirewear.com/ every day clothing for the individualistic billionaire wannabe
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:23:04 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
Strong__Belwas ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:32:00 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
i...might buy this.
xflorgx ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:23:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Their prices are surprisingly reasonable.
Hooman_Super ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 16:03:43 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
r/softwaregore
Funnyguy_777 ยท -18 points ยท Posted at 16:16:17 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I just got a blowjob ๐
Hooman_Super ยท -3 points ยท Posted at 18:29:20 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
๐mmm she swallow le cum?
Funnyguy_777 ยท -1 points ยท Posted at 18:38:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yes!!! She swallowed my cum ๐
terminator3456 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 16:17:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I'm convinced the worse a companies website is the more powerful they actually are.
You_meddling_kids ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:43:54 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Hey that active wear site is hot stuff by comparison
CTMemorial ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:27:31 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
"15 minutes can save you 15% or more by switching to GEICO." - Warren Buffet apparently
flameoguy ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:15:02 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That GEICO ad must be an ancient artifact by now. Who would've thought we used to have plaintext ads?
blebaford ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:41:32 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I actually love that. I've been getting really sick of the JavaScript-heavy menus and huge fonts and images that are common nowadays.
xodus989 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:26:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That guy's a dick.
http://www.viewtouch.com
cs3f16 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:39:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
it's not even secured website.
shizenmeister ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 16:24:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I have to use a gov site for work sometimes and they routinely lose my password and their password requirement is for EXACTLY 8 characters.
Vbarb ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 19:30:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
How does one lose a pw?
shizenmeister ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 19:36:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I'd love to know the answer to that question.
[deleted] ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 16:08:52 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I work on a government website, it is recommended to use IE 5.5 (that is from around 2000).
Lapper ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 21:21:31 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Isn't IE 5.5 the last version of IE that was on Mac? That shit's ancient.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:29:11 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Yup
freddynietzschy ยท 39 points ยท Posted at 15:05:31 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Can confirm, governments never seem to hire decent web designers.
otisanek ยท 34 points ยท Posted at 16:25:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They generally don't even hire actual web designers. I was an IT specialist for the government and ended up on the committee that was responsible for building the new website for our organization.
Never built a page in my life past college, and I found that a majority of decisions seem to be made by people nearing retirement who cannot accept change from the early 90s aesthetic.
uptnapishtim ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 17:01:22 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Design by committee.
SDGfdcbgf8743tne ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:31:23 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I don't care what anyone says, scrolling marque text is a fantastic idea.
Amish_guy_with_WiFi ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 15:38:06 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Y would they? It only has to be functional.
vizualb ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:54:45 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
It doesn't have to look pretty, but some of these websites have super user unfriendly UI and navigation. Trying to fill out a form with multiple text fields is one I've ran into a few times that can be extremely frustrating
draaakje ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:42:54 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
And that's how you end up with shitty websites. Design is not (just) about the look and feel. It's mainly about function. Check out the British government website. Not flashy / fancy but simple, clear and easy-to-use. Basically, it works very well.
push_ecx_0x00 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 06:28:21 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That's actually really, really nice
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:27:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
They just use Doug from down the hall who looked at some HTML once.
JZN ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 16:37:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I used Massachusetts unemployment for three weeks a few years ago during a bad new housing stretch. The website closed at 5pm, the password requirements were even worse than those, with the added comfort of PIN numbers, and most of the navigation sent you in circles back to the home page or demanded you call someone anyway. Got to wonder if it's intentional...
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:02:22 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That's how MO state services sites are. Everything is a loop to call someone, you can't actually do very much online and you have to sit on hold forever.
[deleted] ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 16:57:39 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You also have to change your fucking password like every 2 months, and there has to be a combo of caps, letters, numbers, and at least one symbol.
And if you get it wrong twice, you're locked out.
Deltaan ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 17:21:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
UK Government Website
angrydwarfuk ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:02:09 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Meks meh proud t' be Bri'ish
DOUEVNLYFTBRO ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:17:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Are you also proud of your lack of porn?
thestickystickman ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:26:03 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Nah we still get porn here, it's just every woman's face is replaced with Theresa May's.
Tutush ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:43:13 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
There were complaints, initially. Until dissenters were assimilated.
angrydwarfuk ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:30:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Fortunately males are unaffected.
guaranic ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:20:36 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Local website There's been a ton of government modernizing of websites within the last few years.
H0LT45 ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:13:54 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Insert broken search function.
toolsheds ยท 19 points ยท Posted at 15:56:54 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
"We're still using Windows XP servers or Windows Servers in general" starter pack
Proceed to take 9 seconds to load a web page
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:29:20 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I know someone that works for ReMax and they still use XP on all of their office computers. And the printer is so old that you cant connect it to a Windows 10 laptop or a Macbook. I get that it's expensive to upgrade every computer, but it's 15 years old...
Beowoof ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:08:06 on December 22, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Wait what's wrong with windows servers? Isn't .NET super common? Like yes, Linux servers are by far the majority, but I didn't think there was anything wrong with windows servers.
Hannibal0216 ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:33:53 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
.mil websites are twice this bad
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:03:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
What's a .mil site?
alyssathegryphon ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:36:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
And security is triple bad.
SFW_developer ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 16:44:28 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I have done work for the state as a software contractor. Mostly on a big public-transit web page. Let me explain to you why government websites looks so stupid. First off, they don't hire designers, they hire nerds like me. It's amazing how much better your site / app looks when you decide to pay a good UX/UI guy or a Front End guy who knows some UX. They instead use boring, stable technology like ASP.NET or Java spring. The main goal for them is for the site to work, not for it to look nice.
SDGfdcbgf8743tne ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 21:35:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The thing is, if your site isn't designed so that people can use it easily, it doesn't work. UX is a fundamental requirement, not just a 'nice to have' to make it look pretty.
It might not throw server errors constantly, but if nobody can achieve what they needed to when they opened the page, you may as well not have bothered.
That's fucking management for you though.
SFW_developer ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:09:47 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I agree, UX is a fundamental requirement. There is a reason people go to school for years to learn UX. Guy's like me (try as I may) don't have the creative skill to design a UI the 'right way'. Shit, I use vim + tmux tied together with bash scripts as an IDE on Xubuntu. Why the fuck would I know how to design a UI?
Centaurus_Cluster ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:42:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
What I'm wondering: it's not like people didn't have a sense for aesthetics 20 years ago. Why?
Jacket_22 ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 18:51:34 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
School sites too
VSSK ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 15:52:39 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I always loved this podcast from Reply All that explains why gov't sites are so shitty: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/34-dmv-nation/
AlexPlainIt ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:30:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I was hoping someone would post this, because if not I was going to and I couldn't remember what podcast it was on. I would have guessed 99pi first.
but this here will give anyone wondering why it's this way the answers they want
Farisr9k ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:01:04 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
So glad someone posted this.
tl;dl : the tender process is SO FUCKING COMPLICATED AND CONVOLUTED only a couple of companies actually know all the secrets to submitting a tender - so they do every whenever a 'refresh' is requested. And they essentially just tweak the existing design because they have no competition. Oh, and they paid like $500K for their 'work'.
thekraken8him ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 17:52:47 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
One of my internship jobs was looking up School District Websites and verifying that their mailing addresses were up to date. You would not believe how many animated gifs I saw.
rathgrith ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:44:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Is this an American thing? I find Canadian websites are hit or miss. Some are very well designed and some are like... this.
exomachina ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:05:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Also Credit Unions!
bge ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 16:51:24 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
My favorite part is logging into what you think is your account only to be redirected to another page asking you to sign in with another account for a service named with an obscure acronym you've never heard of. After that you've got about another 80% chance of having to sign into an obsolete Microsoft of Oracle system with a username and password that may be either of the previous ones, or a new one altogether.
R34P3RS1XS1X ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 16:57:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Or the opposite end of the spectrum for passwords. Must be greater than 8 characters contain letters and numbers, at least 2 capitals, at least 2 special symbols, can not be any of your last 10 passwords, cannot contain any party if your name, cannot contain any part of your SSN, cannot contain any part of your DOB, cannot contain any part of the answerable security questions. Thanks AKO....
metastasis_d ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:39:47 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Please create 4 digit PIN
No consecutive numbers may touch
No repeating numbers
Can't be DOB. Can't be last 4 Can't contain the numbers in your unit, battalion, brigade, or division
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:01:42 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Imagine something 10x worse, welcome to Indian govt websites.
wrecktvf ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:23:12 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Please add "(This process can only be completed between 9 am and 5 pm, Mon to Fri. Please try again later.)" Why some New York state websites can only operate during their office hours is beyond me.
rofl_rob ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 16:24:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Usually starter packs are very localized but this one is very international.
TryMyBalut ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 16:20:05 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Not sure how common this is, but our inventory software is MS-DOS based. Oh and a government website I access daily that has confidential information always triggers privacy alerts in Chrome and I'm told I should exit the website. Oh and we also have manufacturing plants in China. But it's ok because everything is kept separate.
DatDamnWolfy ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:52:13 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
oh the struggle i went through to get a green card
Dreamerlax ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:49:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Are they only open from 9-5?
joedl1 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:36:18 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
As a student who interned in a corporate tax department this summer, I can tell you first hand each state's own slightly different and totally shit site for collecting corporate tax is horrible. One thing I wish each state didn't do differently.
spookdogg ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:02:09 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
you are assigned a random password (zkd9878sdhad0aduad) that you have to enter for literally fucking everything
SalarianStroud ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:00:25 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Wish the password was more accurate. More like Minimum 14 characters and must contain an upper, lower, number, symbol, and has to be changed every 60 days, and a govt ID login where you enter your pin # 3 times before getting through to a half functioning website.
Keebler172 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:44:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Governments are funny ยฏ_(ใ)_/ยฏ
Hooman_Super ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:30:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:03:21 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
Keebler172 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:46:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Governed mints are even funnier. Is that a federal reservation?
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:55:46 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
Keebler172 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:48:47 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Should I call the White House?
iemfi ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:57:20 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Here some of them shut down for the night.
Ohsoeasy ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:35:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, and the search box is useless unless you want to look through thousands of results.
RTwhyNot ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:54:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You are missing the the obvious lack of security. Nice to have my personal data out there for the world to have.
Natatos ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:19:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I don't know if it's still broken, but about a year ago I tried visiting the Senate website using HTTPS everywhere. Their certificates were out of date or set up wrong, and if it was forced to use HTTPS the website would just redirect to the home page. I sent an email to an IT related email for the Senate saying that needed to be fixed, and mentioned HTTPS everywhere.
I got no response at all, but tried visiting the website a week later, and instead of it working, they changed it to redirect to a page saying that certain plugins could cause the website to break.
akornblatt ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:24:30 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
As someone who works with government websites, this is far too accurate.
CarpeCookie ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:26:35 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Also, it only works with outdated versions of Internet Explorer
zpeed ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:29:23 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The whole thing is also written in HTML
Apeshaft ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:39:29 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Here in Sweden Arbetsfรถrmedlingen (unemployment office) spent 100.000.000 kr on a new web site and after two years they said fuck it and scrapped the whole project.
Mac_User_ ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:22:45 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot the $10,000,000 price tag.
spicy_tofu ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:48:17 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Hey there. Government employee here (US DOT). This is very accurate except for one thing. Password requirements. Password requirements for internet databases we use dont state the password requirements (you have to guess) but are often: no words from the dictionary (wtf) one capital one punctuation and at least one letter and number. We're also required to change them all the fucking time. I forget mine often. Coworkers of mine write them on post it notes and stick them to their monitors because they forget them all the time and also because THEYRE FUCKING INSANE
ClevelandSteamer81 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 07:02:41 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Everyone of my passwords can be found in my email contacts. Changing our passwords monthly for 25 sites that could be 5 sites is annoying!
tanukisuit ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:06:24 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Also, your email address is the login, not a username.
tanukisuit ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:08:12 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
States actually have competitions with each other each year for the best designed website. Or so I've heard from a state worker who was on the state website development team for Washington State.
AnimeLuvrr ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:09:43 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is like the clearest cut example of just how inefficient our government really is. Then compare it to any website in the private sector. It's a joke.
FULL_METAL_RESISTOR ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:20:31 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I've got a job interview tomorrow to be a web developer of a government organization. My dream is to rid the world of these types of website designs.
Wish me luck.
always_go_right ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 16:37:46 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I have the best idea. Lets put these people in charge of managing and regulating our economy!
Caudiciformus ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:20:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot the American flag.
vizualb ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:57:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
*64x64 pixel animated gif of American flag with four frames
lawr11 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 16:45:05 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Even the Illuminati's official website is like, a splash screen.
fatboy93 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 15:29:15 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot jre2
Octaweb ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:44:19 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Same with industrial manufacturers' websites
mynameisjiev ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:00:09 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Everything except the password. It's usually no fewer than 10 characters, must contain at least one uppercase, one number, one special character and no repeated characters.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:38:58 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Tfw you live in PA so government websites are decent.
PA-Noa ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:55:59 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Also starter pack for small local stores websites
mitts281 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:07:13 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
That password part is way off.
256bitsofentropy ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:07:37 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Well this hits close to home
Cory123125 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:33:38 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot an option to email you your password if you forgot it.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:41:36 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
site only works during work hours
EpyonNext ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:43:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
YMMV, to be honest. I've seen some government websites that haven't had a revamp since 2006, and I've seen some that look like masterpieces that were deployed last week. It's more the latter than the former though.
threetogetready ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:43:47 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
and these are the people that we let control sensitive information.
Odusei ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:45:49 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Go to IRS.gov if you want to see what a government website looks like when it's a money-maker.
Pansarmalex ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:49:17 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I can understand the IE6, 800x600 part. Governmental websites need to be accessible for all, even if they're running their OS on a potato over dial-up.
_Swagas_ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:59:16 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Not always true. I work for a state government department that does a majority of our services through our website. Our website is actually pretty up-to-date, simple, pleasant-looking, and user-friendly.
Some other departments in my state, though...their websites are definitely stuck in the early 2000s.
Mr_Genji ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:38:05 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot about code base size. Healthcare.gov comes to mind.
chrslp ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:54:47 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh you wanted to check out a health plan then go back to check out another? You have to restart from the beginning now!
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:59:01 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Many of the US government websites are actually pretty nice now like whitehouse.gov, USA.gov, cia.gov, and house.gov. Just don't head over to dea.gov because their site is just as bad as the organization itself
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:24:27 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Fuck the Canadian student loan website. You get a message saying you have urgent mail, so you go to the site to check. Try logging in, site crashes. Try again, now it tells you your account has been locked because of a failed attempt to log in. So now you have to call their help line to unlock it and they just tell you to make a new account in the future... Why am I able to just make a new account every time? How is that more secure than just not locking my account in the first place...
MCR4Lyfe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:26:28 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly like the HFS site we have to deal with.
The-Prophet-Muhammad ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:36:52 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
AND YET, somehow the managed to snag every dickpic you've sent.
__word_clouds__ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:40:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Word cloud out of all the comments.
I hope you like it
hawkeyehatton ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:14:51 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Unless you're talking about GOV.UK which is actually a great site.
moeburn ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:16:26 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
These starterpacks are really having to spell out the joke lately, huh? It's starting to become like a 1920's political cartoon where they just slap "SOCIALISM" on a pig or something.
misterhamtastic ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:09:54 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You misspelled 'bureaucracy'.
clayman247 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:34:29 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Personnel clerk in the army, can confirm.
lenswipe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:38:04 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
you forgot iframes
nmuir16 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:56:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Canada is updating websites with a growing cost of 1 billion dollars.
BoogsterSU2 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:06:55 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Government websites are nothing compared to my city's website.
cragglerock93 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:07:59 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is the UK's Central Government website. It's genuinely excellent.
Dahaole ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:12:33 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot the ever convenient http addresses used for landing pages.
"Simply point your browser to: https://ancon.us.army.mil/adefcontracen4/$/bort/portalwelcome.htm"
BattlestarGrammatica ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:32:43 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I have to trawl city government websites for my soul destroying call center job, and this is right on the money.
deflateddoritodinks ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:38:41 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Enter data. Click enter. Go back and see data unchanged. Click again. Enter again.Go back to insure data is actually entered. Proceed.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:02:41 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Haha spot on
passivelyaggressiver ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:35:23 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot contact listings to incorrect or defunct offices.
MoralisticCommunist ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:51:16 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I swear to God the people who design government websites are all 60 year old technicans who still don't know how to use all the newfangled technology like email.
GotItFromMyDaddy ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:54:16 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
This is the present in Korea
SaschaHershey ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:17:15 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Government sites must be completely ADA compliant and work with a variety of technologies across different generations. A lot of patch jobs have taken the place of legitimately upgrading to newer systems. It is going to take a huge investment on a local and national level to fix this across the board. By the time that happens, they will be out of date again.
ShittDickk ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:31:25 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Don't forget only 1 tab open at once.
Like goddamn really EDD? How the fuck am I supposed to side by side compare jobs then?
idarin ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:33:16 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I work for the government as a software developer. This painfully reminds me of some of the systems we maintain.
Hey, at least years ago it turns out they upgraded a few of them from Classic ASP to .NET 2.0 - while changing absolutely nothing about how the interfaces looked or worked because god forbid we have to retrain the users that have worked there since the mainframes were in business.
Midnight_Morning ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:59:16 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
USPTO Website. https://www.uspto.gov/
We at least try to stick with the KISS method.
HAZAH93 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 03:32:18 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
As a web developer for NASA, I can confirm all of this.
Lan_Del ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:10:26 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Same goes for most guitar stores in my city. It's impossible to pick a specific brand and order them by price.
applejuice4545 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 06:04:22 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Don't forget those confirmation emails
ShiroHachiRoku ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 06:46:53 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
What I don't get is why the IRS doesn't have an online payment system or one where you can check what's left on your payment plan! I called every couple of months just to see what the balanced owed was and waited on hold for over 15 minute each time! It's 2016! Why isn't there an online system for this?!?!?
Autumn_Fire ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:35:30 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
My sides
spearchuckin ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:40:08 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
The US Army makes all enlisted soldiers take online courses in order to advance in rank. Now imagine this clusterfuck of shit on the website we have to use to do it. Imagine the course taking days at a time to complete. Imagine some parts not saving progress or not loading properly causing you to have to refresh the page and lose everything. And no fucking presidential candidate has said or proposed to do shit about this.
Daxiongmao87 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:42:31 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
In my experience in the military all my government passwords required a length between 10 to 16 characters, at least one capital, one lower case, one number, one symbol, must start with a letter, no consecutive characters, and cannot have been used as your last 3 passwords. It also expires in 3 months
IndianPhDStudent ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:43:50 on December 21, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Also, highlighted or underlined words in a different color, which, upon clicking, you find was never a link and was simply colored/underlined for emphasis.
TimesNeuRoman ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:46:17 on December 21, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
don't forget they're filled with mauve, taupe, pale blue, and awful warm grey schemes.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:28:28 on December 21, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Forgot the part where they make you re-enter information 3 or 4 times because their system isn't smart enough to pass the information through.
mustafa2812 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 14:46:13 on December 30, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Oh man I'm in charge of a government website and this hits way too close to home for me
cisxuzuul ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:50:50 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
Sounds more like military intranets than the external sites
A_Very_Bad_Kitty ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:11:10 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
I was looking at the New Zealand immigration website (because Trump) and I was blown away by how amazing it looks. We could NEVER have this in America!
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:44:59 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
EraYaN ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:44:18 on December 20, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
And you are in no need of money. Government jobs are not the highest paying. As contractors sometimes.
hireddithowareyou ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 17:31:31 on December 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)
For everyone complaining about government websites, check out 18F and the TTS Office of Acquisitions. They're making real changes towards how US government websites look and are purchased.