rant

The Association for Computing Machinery is one of the oldest and most popular organizations in computing, with the self-professed mission of “advancing computing as a science and a profession”. Here is some historical background. Being the flagship society in computing, I think it is only justified that ACM should boast a good website, holding to the highest standards in web design and accessibility.

Until some time back, the ACM web site was fairly old school and lacking in most feature of any good standards-compliant website. I wanted to pull up a snapshot of an older version of the home back from archive.org, however, ACM seems to have blocked their crawlers. Unfortunate. Anyways, it seems like they finally got their act together (for the main web site at least), and moved to a full fledged content management system (Plone) instead of home brewed custom scripts and hand written HTML. As a result, the web site seems much more professional and accessible. Note that despite their claim, the site does //not// validate but I won't hold it against them, since the number and type of errors is not significant.

What does bother me a lot, however, is the state of the ACM Digital Library (actually the entire portal). The layout and code of the site hasn't changed in well over 7 years now. The HTML seems to be generated by some archaic home-brewed system and it is horribly broken in many many ways. Normally this wouldn't bother me too much, but recently I had the misfortune of trying to screen scrape some of their web pages, which is when I realized exactly how ugly and dysfunctional the code was.

• First of all, the pages claim to be XHTML Transitional in the DOCTYPE tag, but the DOCTYPE is not even in the right place!! Recall that the DOCTYPE must be the first thing to appear on a page to actually mean anything. But all pages in the digital library start with a weird <style> tag.
• Even if we ignore the positioning of the DOCTYPE tag and assume the document is otherwise valid XHTML Transitional, we will be wrong by a long shot. I ran one of the web pages through the W3 Validator, and guess what, it reported more than 1200 errors!! To make sure the majority of errors were not due to the wrong DOCTYPE, I manually specified the correct DOCTYPE, and even then, the validator reported more than 1300 errors. That is just simply unacceptable.
• There are NO accessibility features at all. Not even the ones that are otherwise available on the rest of the ACM website.
• There is very little separation between content and presentation. In other words, CSS is hardly used, and used badly wherever it is. For instance, if a paper title has a colon in it, the generated HTML contains two separate strong tags, one for the part before the colon and one for the part after the colon!!
• There is absolutely no semantic information (by means of rich class names and attributes) embedded in the page for things like title, authors, keywords etc.
• Uses tables for layout (if you didn't know, using tables for layout is EVIL)
• The generated HTML is just downright ugly. Some tags are capitalized while others are not. Some attributes are capitalized while others are not. There are arbitrary spaces and new lines (or lack thereof) all over the page.

The lack of semantic hints in the markup is I think particularly bad for a website such as the ACM Digital Library because it is a source of some extremely rich information which can be put to some wonderful use only if it was easier to access. Consider the CiteULike bookmarklet that allows one-click addition of pages to your library. Right now the plugin to parse ACM DL's pages has to do some really ugly regular expression foo to get at the meta data for an article, whereas with semantic markup those details would be trivially extractable. Similarly, sites such as Google Scholar would benefit tremendously from such rich markup.

Please, ACM, get your act together.

I have previously written about my bad experiences with RegisterFly, particular since their debacle with ICANN. Since then I have moved my domains elsewhere, so RegisterFly does NOT manage them anymore. In fact, GoDaddy officially took over all domain names being managed by RegisterFly.

Despite that, for the past week I have been getting daily reminder emails from RegisterFly, curtly informing me that one of my domains is about to expire. Not only is it extremely annoying, it is stupendously dumb and obtuse on RegisterFly's part. The very least then could do is turn off their stupid electronic reminders, or keep their database up to date! There is extensive coverage of the whole RegisterFly issue over at the ICANN blog.

I hate you RegisterFly. I hate your management and their guts for continuing this insanity. I hope the law brings you to justice and make you pay for all the inconvenience you have caused to your unsuspecting customers.

UPDATE (5/15/07): I had initiated a transfer to GoDaddy 3 business days ago and I'm happy to report that my domains have been successfully transferred!! So apart from the money I lost to RegisterFly, all is well, atleast for now. I just hope GoDaddy doesn't go under anytime soon. And I have disputed the RegisterFly transaction – I hope that comes through as well.

UPDATE: I can't believe how stupid/ignorant I have been. It seems that due to several disputes, on March 31st ICANN cancelled RegisterFly accredition as registrar. Since then, there has been no support, they have been eating up money from new registrations and their phone numbers have been cancelled. More details here and this FAQ on the ICANN blog. GoDaddy has a special offer for RegisterFly customers. I'm going to transfer my domain names ASAP and so should you.

A few years back I moved all my domains from GoDaddy to RegisterFly. GoDaddy's interface was image infested and extremely cluttered. RegisterFly looked much more streamlined and clutter free – it seemed to be going in the right direction. And so on by one I transferred my domains to RegisterFly. I was pretty happy them, until a few weeks back. Here's why.

It turns out that the only reason I was happy that I really never had an occassion to deal with RegisterFly support. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. A few weeks ago I wanted to register a new domain name. So I logged into my RegisterFly account, and started the process to procure that domain name. On the checkout screen, among the other payment options, I was shown an option to pay using PayPal. How convenient, I thought.

Well, not so fast. RegisterFly redirected me to PayPal where I made that payment. PayPal redirected me back to the RegisterFly confirmation page, where to my bewilderment I was greeted with an error message, saying something vague like “Sorry, there was a problem with your transaction.”

Confused, I went and checked my PayPal account. Sure enough, my account had been debited. Infact, I even received an email from PayPal confirming the transaction. Meanwhile something even funnier was happening at my RegisterFly account. I logged in to find that my balance read $109 – thats right, for some reason RegisterFly thinks I deposited 11 times the amount I was supposed to pay them. Strangely (and fortunately) though, my PayPal account has not been debited any further. Needless to add, the domain had still not been registered.

Completely flustered, I thought its time to contact customer service. If you head to the RegisterFly support page, you'll notice how they rave about their new and improved customer service in bold letter. Bah! They proudly claim phone support, email support and ticket support. If only!

Anyways, so I did create a ticket, explaining the situation in as much detail as I could. I gave all the required information. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. I opened that ticket on April 16th – it has been more than three weeks since then, and my ticket has been untouched. I haven't even got as much as a “We'll get back to you shortly” from their support team. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Its like they don't exist. I put in several further comments, clarifications on my ticket hoping they'll pick up the activity. Fat chance!

Extremely frustrated, I figured I should try the “new” phone support. I called their number (305-674-0165) every day for a week during their specified business hours. NO ONE PICKED UP THE PHONE, NOT EVEN ONCE. Go figure.

So much for customer support. But thats not the end of it. Not only did I lose my money, I am now unable to register that domain name at all. I tried re-registering for the domain thinking that I'll just pay with my credit card this time, and the system comes back to me with a message saying something like “This domain is being processed”. Hellooooooooo, give me a break!!

Anyways, I don't have words to describe how pissed off I am with these people. If you have any suggestions as to how to get to them, please let me know. If you have had better/worse experience with RegisterFly customer support, leave me a comment. I'll update this post if/when I make contact with their elusive support team. Till then, if you are using RegisterFly, seriously consider moving elsewhere.

If ever a course were to be offered on “How to lose your customer in 10 days”, I think the fine folks at Remit2India would be right on top of their game. Now, we all know that with the increasing proliferation of the Indian junta world wide, the online money transfer market is an interesting market to be doing business in. Being one of the earlier players in this arena, you would have expected that Remit2India would have learnt the art of customer relationship management along the way. Well, you'll be surprised.

Here are a few glimpses of my trysts with this wonderful service.

I got this gem in my inbox a few days back:

Astute readers of this blog will immediately make the following observations:

• My name is not Kaustubh or anything remotely similar. Its not visible above, but the To: or CC: headers did not contain my email address either. So I was BCCed an email which was not meant for me. Fine privacy management, if you ask me. If we won't look after one another, who will?
• Clearly Mr. X felt it was necessary to remind us that not only was Remit2India a Times Group Company, it was also a Times of India Group Company. Now don't you forget that subtle distinction, you knuckleheads!
• Mr. X is the next generation relationship officer. Notice the funky lingo: b'coz …

Anywho, so here's my obligatory response to them:

No response yet.

I'm sure you're all fairly impressed by Mr. X by now. Naturally, he's quite a pro. He's been at this for quite a while now. Digging into my archives, I pulled this up:

The message is not as interesting as the people it was sent to. Apparently Mr. X thought it necessary that all Remit2India customers must get acquainted with one another, whether they want or not. So he composed a nice email, shoved in everyone's addresses on the To: list, and determined as he was, pressed Send. Smooth move there Johnny.

Not to leave behind this excellent opportunity, several of my fellow customers at Remit2India took it upon themselves to apprise others of the situation. It seems like a lot of people had not so good experiences with previous such offers from Mr. X, and diligently they found themselves REPLYING TO ALL with all the nuts and bolts and gory details. Ah, the camarederie.

After about 10 mails on this thread had piled into my inbox, I couldn't take it anymore. I sent out the obligatory “Reply to all” message myself:

To their credit, my friends on the thread were listening, and they never got back to me again. To their discredit, however, the Remit2India folks just chose to ignore my complaints (yet again).

But the saga does not end here. Tired of the HTML-only emails that Remit2India so loves sending people, I sent them the following note:

I got the following boiler plate response:

Well, atleast they got my name right. But nothing else happens, I keep getting HTML emails. The support team still has my ticket open, so I remind them again, and again, and again. Each time, I get back the same boiler plate response. Frustrated, I wrote to them again:

It really amazes me how these companies manage to ignore any customer feedback. Given the fact the service is largely targeting tech-savvy audience who spend some time online and are comfortable doing their finances online, I think its just dumb to ignore and not address these relatively small issues.

Good luck to Remit2India!