While trying to buy tickets online for the Ontario Science Centre, I saw this:
Seriously, how hard is it to accept a postal code without a space and add it yourself?
Later on in the transaction, I hit an SSL error because the certificate was valid for "www.ontariosciencecentre.ca" but I happened to type "ontariosciencecentre.ca" into my browser, and none of the links after that redirected me to "www.". If their certificate relies on the "www." prefix, then their web server should be redirecting me.
They might know everything there is to know about science (and they do, I've loved going to the Science Centre since I was a kid), but their webmaster has a few things to learn.
Update: As you can see in the comments, Ken Huxley from the Science Centre has fixed the postal code problem and is working on fixing the SSL problem as well. Kudos to him, and my apologies for my condescending "has a few things to learn" comment above (not to mention the title of the post). When he mentioned that he was going to reconfigure DNS to fix the SSL problem, I realized that I understand at a high level what he's going to do, but I have no idea how to actually do it. I guess I have a few things to learn as well. But if I hadn't whined written about the problems I found, they wouldn't have gotten fixed, so it's nice to know that my blog has made the world a better place.
4 comments:
Wow, there must be a recent breakout of stupidity when it comes to postal codes - I also recently needed to enter my postal code and entered it with out the space, and got a response saying something along the lines of "what you have entered looks like a valid postal code, but please reenter it with a space". How dumb is that! Maybe its just coincidence, or perhaps the same developer (or tool) created both sites?
Hi Graeme,
I'm Ken Huxley, Web Editor at the Ontario Science Centre.
Thank you for your feedback regarding our e-commerce system. Fortunately, one of our Membership staff alerted me to your blog post, otherwise I would have been uninformed of your observations. We highly value visitor feedback and make every attempt to improve our websites based on it. In future, please feel free to email webmaster[at]osc.on.ca or call me directly at (416) 429-4100 ext. 2024.
The library of regular expressions we use to validate form data was developed by my predecssor. The postal code format is strict in order to validate memberships in our database. We haven't received any negative feedback about it until now, so given our limited resources and busy development schedule, we've left things as is. However, based on your critique, I've modified our code base to accept Canadian postal codes with or without a space.
I'm still not clear regarding part two of your comments:
""Later on in the transaction, I hit an SSL error because the certificate was valid for "www.ontariosciencecentre.ca" but I happened to type "ontariosciencecentre.ca" into my browser, and none of the links after that redirected me to "www.". If their certificate relies on the "www." prefix, then their web server should be redirecting me."
Can you clarify at which point in the transaction this takes place?
Once OSC Membership credentials are validated on our website and the customer clicks the "Continue" button, they leave our site and are taken to Tickets.com, our ticket vendor via a URL like this one:
http://purchase.tickets.com/buy/TicketPurchase?organ_val=21059&perfcode=OS1217&perfsubcode=2008
Customers remains in the Tickets.com e-commerce process funnel until the transaction is complete or they exit the site, so "ontariosciencecentre" appears nowhere in the URL string.
Any extra info you can provide us regarding your experience is greatly appreciated.
Kind regards,
Ken
Hi Ken, thanks for your comment. I understand that the postal code thing was very low priority. I'm a software developer myself, so it's just one of those things that annoys me about other software -- programs that seem to understand what you mean, but forces me to make the change rather than doing it itself. Kudos for fixing it.
I realize now that I described the SSL problem incorrectly. The problem didn't occur when buying tickets for the movie, but when trying to renew my Science Centre membership. I just reproduced it now:
1. Enter "http://ontariosciencecentre.ca/" in the address bar (I'm using Firefox 3 on Windows XP)
2. Click "Members & Donors"
3. Click "Membership"
4. Click "Join or renew now"
Firefox gives me the SSL error (see image here). I get a similar error using IE 7.
If I do the above steps except use the URL "http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/" in step 1, everything works properly.
BTW, I did email the webmaster with most of this information (though not the detailed repro) on Sunday, right after making the blog post.
Hi Graeme,
Thank you for the detailed information regarding the SSL problem. This is very helpful for trouble-shooting.
To avoid the cost of a second security certificate, we're looking into configuring things at the DNS level to redirect to www.ontariosciencecentre.ca.
We hope to turn this around quickly. I'll drop you a line when the problem is resolved.
Thanks again for your feedback, Graeme. We appreciate it. It's not often we get input from other software developers.
Cheers,
Ken
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