Smörgåsbord

When person A tells person B to lay off the crackpipe, it’s usually because A doesn’t understand B’s humour. Usually, B is not smoking crack. B is, in fact, displaying what he or she thinks is good sense of humour. Well, whoever implemented the registration process for FaceBook and the associated bug reporting functions has a REALLY GREAT sense of humour.

Prelude

Yesterday I decided to register at Facebook. Yes, I know, this is against some of my principles but I don’t think I’ll be making myself popular by being a total nerd each time – I am not going to ask near-strangers to make a special effort when they want to share $pictures_taken_during_certain_event_with_me_in_it with me. I just want to download the pictures to my own album thankyouverymuch, and I need an account for that.

Registering

Well, the form for registering on the facebook homepage looks simple enough. I usually use my gmail-account when signing up to websites, with my accountname suffixed by +some_tag. This is called “sub-addressing” and it’s mighty convenient. Do you have gmail? Try it! If your email address is myaccount@gmail.com, send a message to myaccount+hey-look-a-sub-address@gmail.com. It will pop up in your inbox. You can then use gmail’s filters on the TO:, use your imagination. If you run your own mailserver, you have even more flexibility in what you can do with sub-addressing.
So I put in myaccount+facebook@gmail.com and hit Sign Up. Facebook responds thusly:

Ah right. But IT IS VALID. It’s not the first time I encounter an email address validation function that doesn’t accept valid email addresses. I suppose development of such a validation function goes a bit like this:

DEV#1: “Chief software architect told us to put in an email validation function.”
DEV#2: “Sure! Hmmm, say, what does a valid email address look like anyway?”
DEV#1: “What, do you think there’s a standard on this? Some sort of agreement on what is a valid email address? Ha-ha-ha! Of course not. And I’m a Web Developer® so I’m an expert on email addresses. I’ve seen so many email addresses in my life, I think I’ve seen them all! I’ll just exclude everything that doesn’t look like an email address I’ve ever seen. Presto!”

The standard the devs were looking for is RFC5322. “Do you know what an RFC is” should be the first question on any job interview for a web developer position. Without standards, you’re nowhere on the internet.

File bug report

Being a good geek, I embarked on a quest to point out the existance of RFC5322 to the Facebook folks. On the Help / Sign Up: Bugs and Known Problems page there’s a “I’d like to submit a bug report” link that takes you to a form for submitting signup bugs.

I could not help but try to use my sub-addressed gmail account as a contact address on this bug, but…

How stupid of me. They need a T! I assume they ran out of. By now I’m thinking of chartering a helicopter, flying to Facebook’s headquarters, and dropping really big concrete letter-T’s on them. But then again, they might not see this as humourous. Oh well, on with the show: I use a non-subaddressed account and click Submit.
A couple of hours later I find this gem in my inbox:

From: The Facebook Team <info+du7b7dy@facebook.com>
To: (address removed)
Subject: Re: SIGNUP-BUGS: valid email address is not accepted
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:14:20 -0700
Reply-to: The Facebook Team <info+du7b7dy@facebook.com>
Sender: <info+du7b7dy@facebook.com>
X-Mailer: ZuckMail [version 1.00]

Hi,

Please reply to this email to verify that you are the owner of the
account that you referenced in your Facebook support inquiry. This
security step must be completed before Facebook can respond to your
inquiry. We apologize for any inconvenience.

If this email address is not associated with your account, please reply
to this email from an email address that is associated with your Facebook
account, ensuring that this email is in your response (this may require
you to copy and paste this text if your email client removes this email
from your reply).

Look at the Reply-to:, the From: and the Sender:. Is that a subaddressed email address or what? This is getting ridiculous!
More worrisome is them mentioning ‘the account you referenced in your Facebook support enquiry’. At this moment I’m thinking that they might need confirmation of the contact details of the bugreport before looking at it. Of course. Because that’s what it said in the ‘Magical T’ form (see screenshot above). I have to enter an email address, and if I have one that’s associated with a Facebook account I am to use that one. If they would require a facebook account for any bug reports they would do the check before letting me submit any bugs at all, wouldn’t they? But any email address is fine – it says so on the form – AND YOUR FORM IS CALLED “SIGNUP-BUGS”! If I’m filing a bug report because I can’t sign up then, by pure and simple logic , I DO NOT HAVE AN ACCOUNT. Requiring me to create an account so I can contact you about not being able to create an account is INSANE. Anyone not on crack gets this, so I get my hopes up and confirm my email address. It is with great anticipation that I open up the e-mail I get twenty minutes later:

From: The Facebook Team <info+du7b7dy@facebook.com>
Subject: Re: SIGNUP-BUGS: valid email address is not accepted
<snip - ed>

We currently do not have a registration under this email address.

Unfortunately, you will need to go through the sign up process again.
If you experience any further problems or encounter issues logging in,
please visit http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=746.

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

FACEBOOK PEOPLE SMOKE CRACK

No of course they don’t. They just happen to have a really intricate sense of humour and a really crappy QA process. I tried to help and point these flaws out to them, but for the moment, I’m defeated. And I’m definitely not going to trust Facebook with my data thankyouverymuch.