stupid
Tesco gift cards online
As a way of saying thanks to the ineffable Becky & Tim (they put me up for a week in their living room whilst I was working in London), I wanted to buy them a gift voucher. Admittedly, Tesco’s isn’t what you’d call the epitome of either originality or awesomeness – but I ate their food and drank their drinks, so wanted to pay them back in kind. I know they shop at Tesco, so it seemed like a solid plan.
But Tesco seem to hate their gift cards. I can’t find one online for love nor money.
A search online for ‘tesco gift card’ returns some results – the main of which takes you to a rather abandoned-looking microsite:
Click to enlarge
Fair enough…but where can I actually buy one online? The homepage gives no indication at all, all the top nav items takes you away from the site, the left nav items take you to various pages that show you the pretty designs you can have, there’s an FAQ section – which says I can buy them in bulk by calling an 0845 number…aaaand there it is: you can’t buy them online. You have to buy them in-store.
Any reference to gift cards are also completely non-existent on the main Tesco site. Search for ‘gift card’ and you’ll get a bizarre selection of results:
This is a bad journey for a powerhouse like Tesco. It took me 5 mins of solid clicking & searching to find out that these can only be bought in-store. Seems a bit pointless to have a microsite dedicated to something that can’t be purchased online.
Moreover, why can’t they be purchased online? Missed a trick there, I reckon.
3Virgin Wines – offer fail
I recently bought something from Amazon, and received a £40 Virgin Wines voucher in the box. I’m usually sceptical of these things, but a read of the T&Cs on the back revealed that I’d be under no obligation to buy anything else in future. It really was £40 towards free wine. Awesome!
Given my recent gripes with Virgin Media’s shiny new 50mb fibre optic connection that keeps disconnecting me, I didn’t really hold high hopes, but I’m an optimist. Plus I want free booze. Let’s go.
I headed over to the specific URL on the voucher to see what’s what:
Click to enlarge
Not a bad start at all – it’s auto-filled the boxes with my voucher details. I click ‘Redeem Voucher’, and it tells me I’ve got £40 to play with:
So, I start paying attention to the delicious booze below. I’m not really a wine fan, but you can’t really sniff at the opportunity to try some for free. These looked nice:
“Normally £79.99, but your price is £39.99 with your voucher”
It’s here that things get misleading, in my eyes. So, this wine is normally £80 but since I’ve come to this special offer bit of the site, they’re £40…and my £40 voucher should cover that. Nice. Freeeeee wiiiiiiiiiine. Etc. Add that badboy to the cart, and off we go:
Click to enlarge
…except…wait a minute:
I pay £46.98?! What about my…oh I see. So when you say it’s NORMALLY £79.99, you mean it’s STILL £79.99. Right. Thanks for that.
Feeling mislead, I think “Ok, no worries: I’ll go back and see if there’s any others on offer that are NORMALLY £40 so I can get some for free” (because, let’s face it, everyone likes free things). So..erm…let’s remove this from the cart.
Except I can’t.
Now stuck in Misleading Wine Sales Land and expecting the worst, I resort to the back button in the browser – and hey presto! It works! Phew…lucky escape there. Except, being the web geek/user experience geek I am, I know how these things can be fickle – so I refresh the homepage. And sure enough, it’s all still in my basket. Oh, and there’re no other wines that’re NORMALLY £40.
FOR F***’S SAKE, VIRGIN.
I’ve given up now. You can keep your wine. But in name of seeing things through, I remove all the JSPsessionID crap from the URL and head to the main www.virginwines.co.uk site – and look! There’s a fully-functioning basket, which proudly displays my £80 case of wine that I don’t fucking want any more.
Bad journey again, Virgin (remember the Virgin Holidays/Weddings site review?). Your UX guys need a kick up the arse, frankly
3Virgin Media: the saga?
On about the 6th of November, I signed up to Virgin Media’s 50mb fibre service.
There were five main reasons for this choice:
- I now point-blank refuse to have anything more to do with BT if I can help it (since they’ve managed to fuck up literally EVERY bill I’ve had since October last year, but that’s another story)
- The previous occupants of my newly-purchase house had a phone line provided by Sky (I think). Therefore I’d have had to have paid BT the princely sum of £129 to get a connection (see point #1 as to why I’m not doing that)
- I know people who work for Virgin, and therefore I get a Friends & Family discount rate
- 50mb fibre is cool
Theses are fairly solid reasons, in my eyes. Except it’s all started to go a bit wrong. Read on to find out more (it’s a bit long, but I say the word ‘fuck’ in it few times, which sort of makes it worthwhile).
3So you want to encrypt filesharing/torrent traffic?
In light of the recent furore over the critically-flawed, Draconian, lobbyist-written Digital Economy Bill, the Internet is already rife with excited rumours that a mere 86 lines of C# code can indeed encrypt your torrent traffic. An article carried on The Register explains all, but a key excerpt is:
The code, sweetly named SeedFucker, is actually an exploit discovered last November that would allow a BitTorent user to fake the IP address of a server from where a file could be downloaded. It could also be used to flood a BitTorrent with dozens of fake peers. The sudden interest in the exploit follows measures in a new UK law, passed last week, where ISPs may be obliged to provide IP addresses to the authorities of files that are said to be infringing copyright.
The worst nightmare of the music industry is likely now to become true (or at least it would be their worst nightmare if they’d given this an ounce of thought): not only have they pushed filesharing underground, it’s going to become much harder to find.
*hands the music industry and the government a crutch to hobble on*
There you go: that should help seeing as you’ve just shot yourself in the foot.
0Digital Economy Bill = complete farce
How are we meant to have ANY confidence in this new piece of garbage legislation when:
- Stephen Timms (the Digital Minister for Britain), thinks an IP Address means ‘Intellectual Property address’?
- Labour MP Mark Todd thinks you can move house and keep your net access without telling your ISP your new address
- The ISP Talk Talk have openly stated they will not comply with disconnection requests
- The public have reacted angrily and openly refusing to recognise the bill
- Filesharers are statistically 10x times more likely to pay for music than those who don’t
- Making a law that’s been written by an industry body is quite clearly WRONG.
- Tech-savvy users will simply start to encrypt their traffic. Then the lawmakers are in trouble: massive (if not impossible) effort to decrypt Internet traffic on a simple suspicion of filesharing.
Plus this sets a worrying precedent for other countries to follow suit.
The takehome? CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS MODEL; DON’T PUNISH YOUR CUSTOMERS.
0Digital Economy Bill looks likely to survive
You may or may not know that a bill of legislation has been rushed through parliament and looks set to become law – known as the Digital Economy Bill.
One of the key points in the bill is that filesharers will face being cut off from the Internet:
- A person need only be suspected of filesharing to receive a warning letter
- 3x warning letters and you’re disconnected from the Internet
- No evidence or proof is required – merely suspicion from a copyright holder
- Requires ISPs to effectively police their user’s web connections
Where is the sense in ANY of the above? It reads thusly:
- If you’re not tech-savvy and someone uses your wifi connection to download illegally, you could be cut off
- Entire businesses could face being offline because of the actions of one person (or the actions of a rogue third-party – see above)
- Since when has NO evidence been required to take drastic steps that could easily result in a person’s loss of livelihood?
- What if government computers/connections are suspected of illegal downloads? Will they be cut off like everyone else?
This also opens up a nice new niche of corporate/industrial sabotage: simply ensure someone is caught filesharing using a business’s Internet connection, and get them cut off: no evidence required!
This isn’t open to abuse AT ALL.
0OMG Affiliate Network flog smut
As a web content type, I know it can be hard to ensure your copy is correct and error-free: hell, I’m sure that once I’ve posted this I’ll spot some typos.
Anyhoo, at least I didn’t get it quite as bad as whoever is responsible for sending out the OMG Affiliate Network newsletter:
Click to enlarge
Porn broker? Nice 
Ridiculous legal disclaimers on websites
Recently, I was asked to update a selection of legal pages on a website. The changes were, largely, dull as batshit. However, one bullet point stood out for me in terms of utter stupidity:
f) Hyperlinks:
You may not create a hyperlink to this website without our prior written consent.
A bit of searching unearthed a whole bunch of sites that use this wording on their legal or T&C pages! Boing Boing recently posted about something similar about the T&Cs for the new Vegemite site. Firstly – and call me Mr Silly if you like – but this is completely ridiculous. It is:
- Unenforcable
- Completely unrealistic
- Against the nature of the web
- If the website is a commercial/retail concern, it’s actually a hindrance
Unenforcable because, being the Internet, anyone can link to anything – much in the same way that anyone can step out of their house and say anything they like to whomever they like in the street.
Unrealistic because you can’t stop people linking to wherever they want from wherever they want.
Against the nature of the web because it’s meant to be a free-speech platform*. Unless you live in N.Korea or China, of course.
If the website is a commercial/retail site, not allowing inbound links is like saying you don’t want to sell anything: people linking to your site is one of the main ways other people will find you and people spread the word.
Finally, having content like that on a site makes the organisation look completely behind the times in terms of how they understand the world (and more importantly the Internet) to work.
*: Yes I know there’s lots of stuff going on with bogus DMCA takedowns and similar, but – generally speaking – people can say what they like.
1Top 5 stupid web design mistakes
Having reviewed a fair few sites over the last year or so, I’ve compiled a quick list of top 5 web design mistakes. It’s by no means exhaustive, but covers the basics. Read on!
0