'tis the season to get annoyed

[waider]

Et tu, ThinkGeek? Like most of the sites I register for that actually support it, I registered for this one using an email address with a plus-sign in it[1]. Today, attempting to do a little Christmas Shopping, I noticed that the email field on the shipping address was empty, and filled in the exact same address as I'd registered with. And the site

Comments

[anavolena]

It never ceases to amaze me the frequency with which people write Yet Another Email Or Phone Validation routine when plenty of established, tested OSS packages out there to use.

[waider]

See comment below from the ThinkGeek monkeys (publicity fixes bugs faster than bug reports...)

ThinkGeek monkey update

[anonymous]

Greetings. I come bearing good checkout news. We caught your issue after @bosca fed this post into the Twitterverse this morning, and have just taken care of the plus sign problem.

The backstory: We updated our checkout process a few weeks ago with some new AJAX code that happened to be a bit buggy. It is now bug-free.

Thanks for the catch,

ThinkGeek Monkeys
@thinkgeek

[waider]

Accepting the plus sign as a valid email character is. Having a RFC (2)822 parser which can cope with it, written in Javascript or the back-end language of your choice, is an entirely separate issue. It's not the ThinkGeek mailer that doesn't cope, it's their front-end (see comment above from the monkeys themselves).

[waider]

To be honest, what annoys me most about the plus-is-space problem is that it's in the same bucket, more or less, as the spaces-vs.-tabs problem in Makefiles: it could have been fixed a long time ago by dropping support for the plainly broken behaviour, but (and I am assuming here) this was not done to avoid breaking the user experience for the miniscule userbase that existed at the time. Stupid, shortsighted, and stupid once again.