Webcall.ca -- the saga continues.

        My webcall device arrived today. Here are some bullet points of the
issues I found and reported to the tech support:

* They started billing me from the moment I was signed up, not the
moment I completed the process and had a working dialtone. That's not cool!

* I had to do trial and error on my username and password, since they
say that normal characters are OK, but any punctuation or shift+number
presses are rejected. They don't tell you specifically that they only
take letters and numbers. Very frustrating for someone who doesn't like
making such simple passwords.

* When I signed up for the billing process initially (a few days ago), I
could not even comfirm I was a customer. The last step gave me an
error. The site then refused to work until I deleted the cookie I had
from it (I suppose Sasktel doesn't like to do sanity checking on web apps).

* The new setup is done via the web (no proprietary Windows, yay!) using
the MAC of your FXS (I got a nice little Cisco device). When I first
tried to do this, I got a page like this:

"Welcome to WebSphere Portal version 5.1

To rearrange portlets on this page, click the Show tools icon. This
action produces tools that allow you to arrange and remove portlets.
Click Edit page to add new portlets or change page layout.

To create a page, click New page. "

..... the new page link worked! Yes, I can easily edit anything on the
site because I was one of those crazy people without Javascript turned
on. (Reminds me of a DailyWTF (
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/108487.aspx ): "As it turns out,
Google's spider doesn't use cookies, which means that it can easily
bypass a check for the "isLoggedOn" cookie to be "false". It also
doesn't pay attention to Javascript, which would normally prompt and
redirect users who are not logged on. It does, however, follow every
hyperlink on every page it finds, including those with "Delete Page" in
the title. Whoops." )

It'd be trivial to do XSS tricks on the site, since they use Javascript
to control access to their senstive information. Wow! I hope that one
gets fixed soon.

* After turning on Javascript, I got this message:
" This portlet is unavailable." -- with no easy link I could find to
get back to the "register new device" link (it's not an My Profile, My
Bills, or My Services -- it's only on the landing page after login,
meaning you'd better like to relogin or remember which of the pages in
your back button history (since they ALL HAVE THE SAME TITLE) was the
landing page for your last login!

Trying again yielded this:
"The WebCall system is currently experiencing difficulties. Please try
back at a later time."

I've already been billed for this service a few days ago, and I haven't
got to use it once.

  =

The support person I talked to about this was very pleasant and
apologized. He seemed very aware that issues existed in the service,
and took notes on all these issues I reported. It was very nice to hear
that the techs are aware of stuff like this and willing to get it fixed,
although he told me the service had been running for 2 *years* in this
state. It reminds me of when Terry Roebuck talked about the Star Trek
model of product management -- you get managers who say, "make it so"
and then never followup with other technical people to ensure that the
issues are ironed out, or to make decisions that management types should
be making.

As it turns out, they had provisioned my account for the big book-sized
thing Scott got, not the small FXS I did receive, which was the major
account blocker for me.
Received on Fri Dec 29 13:22:29 2006