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Strange things Web Sites do!

I'm going to start making occasional posts when I find a website that is doing something particularly bizarre although I won't name the specific websites in question.

Yesterday I decided to send some feedback to a local radio station about the lack of decent coverage of the recent storms in the Northwest which meant that many of us were isolated without power, phone, internet etc. So I went to their website which appeared to be quite professional and found a "contact us" page where I clicked on the appropriate email address. Nothing happened. At this point I realised that the email address wasn't text but an image!
The only reason I can think that they went to the trouble of creating images of text is to avoid spam. I guess that's a creative solution to the spam problem but it make it more difficult for people to give them feedback and leaves those using screen readers with no solution for contacting them at all. Accessibility is really important for websites and is something that every web master should consider! I'd expect a radio station of all things to want to be accessible to the visually impaired.
Naturally I typed in the email address and sent them feedback on this as well as the poor news coverage of the storm.

Have you seen something really strange/bad that a website is doing?

-Dave

P.S. The website concerned has promised to fix the problem.

Published Wednesday, December 20, 2006 8:58 AM by DMassy

Comments

# re: Strange things Web Sites do! @ Thursday, December 21, 2006 12:18 PM

I agree, not very accessible, however, since SPAM is such a huge issue, when attempting to publicly provide an email address... there's limited options.

As soon as the address is a readable string by wget, or any other screen scraping tool, you're out of luck...

I'd be interested in your solutions... as would all web developers fighting this since the 90's.

steve_web

# re: Strange things Web Sites do! @ Thursday, December 21, 2006 2:40 PM

Steve,

I agree spam is really annoying but hiding email addresses in inaccessible ways is clearly not an acceptable solution.

I'm not an expert in any way on spam filters but there are plenty of pretty effective spam filters supplied on even free email accounts these days and that is where efforts need to be made.

Spam is annoying but I sometimes wonder if the problem is overstated a little. My own email address is pretty discoverable on the web DMassy@microsoft.com so I get quite a bit of spam. However it isn't anywhere near the point where I cannot cope with it with Exchange and Outlook filtering out the worst of it quite effectively. I think the antiphishing filter introduced in IE7 helps protect people but that's not going to help with spam.

I liken it to the junk mail I get at home which just goes straight in the bin unread. That is annoying to me more for the complete waste of the worlds resources than the time it takes me to throw it away. I'd love to see our society take steps to limit that issue. On a related note here in the US they introduced a "Do not call" registry to limit nuisance phone calls with people trying to sell you stuff you don't need. Once I got on that list I felt I could answer the phone again as it had got to the stage where I just let calls go to voicemail and rarely picked up the phone! Unfortunately these businesses see enough of a return on investment to keep sending unwanted stuff to people in physical mail, email and phone calls.

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# re: Strange things Web Sites do! @ Tuesday, December 26, 2006 4:52 PM

Here is a CSS rule I've seen on msdn.microsoft.com:

pre {

 white-space: normal

}

...makes all the code snippets unreadable in all browsers that correctly support the CSS white-space property. Pretty strange to me.

Erik Arvidsson

# re: Strange things Web Sites do! @ Sunday, December 31, 2006 12:30 AM

Great feedback Erik. I'll pass it onto the MSDN team.

Thanks

-Dave

DMassy

# re: Strange things Web Sites do! @ Friday, January 05, 2007 9:04 AM

For steve_web:

For hiding emails, you can have partial solution here:

http://serviciipeweb.ro/WebServices/HideEmail.aspx

Enter your email and press result!

Andrei Ignat

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