Discover Card Doesn’t Get Redirects
I got a mass email from Discover Card today:
Dear WILLIAM REARDON, Within the next two weeks, the address of Account Center will be changing. At that time, if you access the Account Center Log In page at its previous location, you will be able to click a link to be directed to its new location. Your user ID and password will not change. Please update your Account Center bookmarks or favorites when you see this change. You can still expect the same security and service in the Account Center—only the location has changed. If you have any questions about these changes, please contact us at 1-800-DISCOVER (1-800-347-2683). Thank you for choosing Discover Card.
I like how big companies try to personalize things to you, like say “Dear so-and-so” and but then lose it all by screaming your name in ALL CAPITALS. Anyway…
So basically, they emailed me to tell me they couldn’t figure out one of the simplest web technologies out there: a redirect. In fact, somewhere along the line there had to be a meeting where a product manager or someone said “Look, if we change the location we’ll either need a redirect or we’ll have to email every single discover card customer” and the IT guy in the room went “Well, that’s a no-brainier. We’ve got to email everyone.”
I tried to think of a plausible defense, and thought, hey, maybe they’re using IIS, or something that makes 302s really hard. I know it’s trivial in Apache, but maybe they’re not using it. Checking what they run via Netcraft, nope, they’re running Apache.
Morons.
I submit the following open letter to Discover
Dear DISCOVER CARD,
I humbly suggest that you consider adding something like the following to your httpd.conf file, so that your customers are not impacted by the upcoming change to your site:
Redirect permanent /old_location http://discovercard.com/new_locationPlease note that you will need to restart the server after the change. I’d assume the restart is obvious, but having not done a one-line tweak to your config from the start, I’ve learned there isn’t much that I can assume.
Speaking of your IT department, I suggest you fire them all for inflicting their stupidity on your entire costumer base.
Regards,
WILLIAM REARDON
September 30th, 2005 at 8:31 am
AMEN.
It’s not hard in IIS either, btw.
September 30th, 2005 at 5:09 pm
They don’t do a redirect because then the change is effectively invisible to the user. That means that the change has little chance of getting updated in user’s bookmarks, etc. That means that they must support the old url forever. I can imagine that there are situations where maintaining the old address indefinately would be undesirable. Hence, a page that says “we moved things; please update your bookmarks”.
Now, whether they use a redirect or a “we’ve moved” page, there’s certainly no need to contact the entire customer base about it. However, I’m sure that a lot of their customers are not computer savvy, and even among those that are, there are many that are weary of phishing, etc., so, to alleviate any potential worry or surprise, why not let people know ahead of time? Seems conscientious, if not even prudent (it is the financial industry, after all).
Seems to me like they did The Right and Clueful thing here, and that you are being The Big Bozo, MR WILLIAM REARDON :-)
BTW, your “preview post” page still has the MT::App::Comments error at the bottom.
Jeffrey
October 1st, 2005 at 1:06 am
I’m semi-convinced you’re playing devil’s advocate here, Jeffrey.
They may have to support it for a few years, but hardly forever. Over time, as people switch browsers, create new bookmarks, etc. a smaller & smaller subset of users will be reliant upon it. By watching the logs, they could figure out when it’s crossed some threshold (say 1%) and then impact just *those* customers.
What’s involved in the support anyway, just keeping a static line in a conf file? Claiming that’s a big deal is sandbangin’.
And I thought some browsers today automatically update the bookmarked URL to reflect something like a 301?
October 1st, 2005 at 1:07 am
(Forgot to mention… tried tracking down the MT error, but after 30 or so minutes of this grossly hacked up MT install, I decided the better thing to do would be to just upgrade MT. Now I just need to find time to do *that*…)
October 1st, 2005 at 8:15 am
Not playing devil’s advocate at all. We certainly had many discussions in Y! Finance over the years as to when we should do a redirect, when to put up an intersticial page, and when to do something else (e.g. ignore the request).
I don’t know the details about what the urls look like or why they’re making the move, and it may well be that the decision to make the move has moronicness at its root, but there’s certainly not enough information available for you or me to know that.
You make it sound as if any 8-year-old would know the obvious thing to do and that they didn’t do it, but it’s not all that obvious at all. I’ve never had a Discover card and have no idea if they’re generally clueful or not, but going by what you said, your reaction is crackpot to me.
Anyway, someone with the GUI of your blog has no right to throw Internet-cluefulness stones at anyone. :-)
October 1st, 2005 at 10:03 am
The GUI of this blog is 1337! I think you’re just jealous.
Anyway, I don’t know the internals of the decision, but I do see the impact on the customer & it does look to be a single URL. In the end, it’s like Yahoo deciding to use PHP — bad call.
October 1st, 2005 at 4:29 pm
Y! would have been better off when Phu made the PHP decision if we would have matched PHP with some appropriate hardware, such as a Commadore 64.
About your cribbing about Discover, how much “impact” is it, really, on the user? You got a message that you almost ignored (I’m guessing), and that if you actually *had* ignored it, you’d be no worse off.
I guess what really bothers me about this is that you sound too much like Derek Balling. Aren’t there reasonable things you could be stressed over, rather than this, at worst, minor nit?
About your blog UI, dude, the display of comments is pathetic. The reader must use too many neurons to determine where/how comments are demarked, and then to figure out which prose was written by whom. The reader has to carefully *inspect* the page to understand the most basic elements. Good UI design means that the reader can understand a lot without having to actually use their brain.
If you’d simply put some space or between the comments, it would make a world of difference.
(By the way, WTF is up with your anti-spam stuff? I had the words “way” and “too” together, and it considered it “questionable”)
October 2nd, 2005 at 11:10 pm
Fair point about the comments & the anti-spam filters… I think it’s time to just upgrade MT.
February 6th, 2006 at 3:39 am
This blog posting is great. Your views are very true. Everyone should start thinking as you are doing.
Andrea Jasperson
http://www.discovercardcenters.com