Internal Server Error

what the voices in my head tell me to write

Monday, August 08, 2005

Don't you just love it when you get the right information

For quite a while we have been getting bug reports from the helldesk about a particular major problem with the 'connect site. Basically the "click here to download" button wasn't there. Big problem. It certainly wasn't affecting everyone on the site but it was happening enough to be worrying.

We spent a long time before I went on holiday looking at this. We actually found several unrelated problems and fixed them along the way but we still got the bug reports.

Finally I have a word with the helldesk and ask them to ask what the users browser was. It turns out they are using IE 5.01! We dont actually support this officially and have not done so for a while. I take a look in IE5 and its obvious. The page layout is busted meaning that the button is obscured by other content.

It was a matter of 5 minutes to sort it out once I had a decent bug report. Apparently several universities in the UK and abroad all bought some intranet solution off the shelf that will only work in IE5 and they are all stuck with it. Poor bastards. Even worse for the sysadmins who have to work there and clean up all the crap.