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[Jopax]

Trying to order a book from B&N as apparently they do ship outside the US. Every attempt gives me a "It was cancelled because it failed the verification process" so I figure I might need an account or something. Create one, still the same issue. Then I find that I might need a phone number for verification so I think to myself fuck it I'll add that too. Except the field tells me I use invalid characters when I input my all numbers phone number. Which is kinda wild because what the fuck else is a phone number supposed to have if not numbers :V

[Starver]

Except the field tells me I use invalid characters when I input my all numbers phone number. Which is kinda wild because what the fuck else is a phone number supposed to have if not numbers :V

Some sites demand the "+<country code>", rather than whatever your international prefix is ("00", here, in +44 land, but can't quite remember what +1 land uses). Others might think the "+" is wrong (but you'd mention if that was included), or handily give an all-countries drop-down choice if you need it (which ideally just leaves the rest of the number to be subject to being 'text validated', unless you deliberately get trickey with the HTML source before submitting...)

And, after the international code, you may or may not need the first digit of the area prefix (again, from UK experience, we drop the "area" 0).

Of course, if you're just putting in (say) "01234 567890" as your number, or whatever it is, you may be falling foul of it assuming you are giving it a US "123 456 7890" style number, in which it's not so much as that you have a non-digit, but that you have a digit that it doesn't expect (or even extra ones).

Without checking B&N myself (who should have done enough trading like this to make it plain enough what they need from what you know), can't really tell what they're looking for. It could also be a space (or lack of it, it used to be a crapshoot whether postcodes of form "AB1 2CD" could be entered in forms as that or "AB12CD", until the validation routines got that little bit more smart about the Area+District/Sector+Unit separation).


Check that you have (by this point) definitely geolocated yourself in <your country>, address-wise, and any modern international-aware webform should perhaps autofill (or make a changable default) and reconfigure its fields to accept what its knowledge is about generally valid phone numbers where you are. (Might be caught out by the odd anomaly, but can't imagine that happens frequently enough if you haven't suddenly had your Subscriber Trunk Dialling codes redone, recently).


Also, and again with no knowledgs of B&N's system, but that message might mean that the verification mail it tried to send to your email address (supplied by you, long before you bothered to try the phone) was not received/acted upon at your end. Check your spam folders, that you gave the right address, etc.


Thirdly, though you probably only had this possibility at any actual payment stage, if I do any card payments online I get a pop-up from my card-issuer getting me to select the (only!) relevent  mobile number registered to itz so that they can send it an authorisation code which I need to enter back into the popup window as a 2nd(ish) factor authentication. Should you have got that, but didn't because of pop-up-blockers, and because you didn't fulfil the request it declined payment, thus the purchase? (The pop-up is essentially cross-site, in that it's not the ecommerce site's business what you do next, just that it must get a "Yes, the card-issuer is happy to continue" response. Different jurisdictions may require/allow totally different levels of cross-confirmation.)


Probably some other possibilities, but all the above give as food for your thoughts. Might or might not inspire a Eureka moment, even if none of the above is on target. And it's about five years since I last bought a book online, and that was neither B&N (which I've never used) nor Amazon (which I forced myself to stop using, more than a decade ago).

[Jopax]

Actually + and 00 are interchangeable afaik, as you can input one or the other when making international calls. Either way, the website has +1 as a fixed part of the field and whatever combination of numbers I'd put in it'd constrain them into 3 sets of 3, automatically putting in the dash between them. Also card info problem is moot because I've tried Paypal too and that gives the same verification error and I know that works because that shit has been paying stuff for years now on other sites. And no email problems either as I've gotten the order confirmed and then moments later cancelled emails just fine and no verification stuff in the junk folders either.

Either way I've given up on the damn thing. Ever since bookdepository got shut down I've had trouble getting books at reasonable rates. Blackwells was an alternative but for whatever reason they won't ship here anymore even tho their site says in big bold letters that it offers free shipping to my country (the way they get around this is that they track your IP and just list everything as out of stock).

I've sworn off Amazon as well, for various reasons, but even without that their shipping is way more expensive than everyone else for whatever reason so it's hardly worth it.

So far the only alternative is ebay and that hasn't had the best track record with actually getting the stuff I've ordered (especially from the UK funnily enough).

[Il Palazzo]

Have you tried AbeBooks? I've had good experience with their no-nonsense service. Admittedly, that was a while back though.
I've also ordered a few things off Blackwell's, this side of the pond, but they have an annoying habit of sending every item separately instead of bundling them together in one package. Which I found out after ordering six books at once :/ .

[Starver]

Actually + and 00 are interchangeable afaik, as you can input one or the other when making international calls.

That depends upon it being sorted behind the scenes. When I was in Germany for a while, my (UK) mobile needed all my UK contacts changed from 0xxx xxx xxxx to +44 xxx xxx xxx (it never happened to me, but I had a colleague try to call me when they'd arrived there and they ended up talking to a confused owner of the 0xxx(as many digits as needed) within Germany itself). And though the International Call Prefix (the "+") is recommended to be "00", not all countries use it. I now seem to recall that North America uses "011", or similar. But, if you have a way to "dial +", it'll sort that out for you according to which system you're having to use. (If in the UK, then it seems to have sense enough to just go to 0xxx...)

Either way, the website has +1 as a fixed part of the field and whatever combination of numbers I'd put in it'd constrain them into 3 sets of 3, automatically putting in the dash between them.

If you're not in North America (I haven't guessed/asked/presumed exactly where you are, but I've been working on the basis you're not close enough to the US to be used to such things) then your number will never start with "+1" (or... your number, but starting with a +1, is not yours). If it isn't irrevocably locked, then you need to give it the "+<whatever>" of your particular international destination. But, for whatever reason, I wouldn't be surprised if the US company doesn't feel like it wants to dial international numbers at all, so never gives you that option.


Not sure there's much more actual advice to give (even if you relented and gave it another bash), but this is what I (think I) know about all this, in case it ever helps you resolve the logic next time. Best I can do, remotely and perhaps even a bit out of date, unless anyone who knows for sure how they got the same site working for them (and/or has actual unwrong information about the US phone system).

[Jopax]

Abe is an amazon company so they have the same silly shipping prices as them.

And yeah I could try inputting my full country+network+phone number but that would be like +385-xx-xxx-xxx in this case and there isn't space for that so they just don't want numbers outside the US I guess.

Honestly I think it comes down to their stated shipping price being lower than they'd want so they just bar folks that would cost more than that from ordering or whatever.

[martinuzz]

Dutch police reports that the explosion in the Hague was targeted against the wedding dress store (as I suspected), and asks the public to share any knowledge they might have.
Three suspects have been arrested in connection to the car that was seen speeding away from the scene.

A total of 6 people died, 5 more injured in hospital, of whom two still in critical condition. Three people from one family died, mom, dad, aand their 17 year old daughter. Only their 8 year old son survived.

[Frumple]

Far less serious, cursed thought of the day: PUA board books for toddlers. I kinda' doubt one exists, but I'm also terrified of looking to check. Some questions you might not want an answer to.

Brought to you by the cover of this book, which looks a hell of a lot like a children's board book if you don't look at it too closely.

[Robot Parade Leader]

Work finally recognizes productivity and expertise .... now that I'm leaving for another job.
Everyone has been treated badly to get everyone to leave/quit find other jobs.

Wonder why I'm leaving if I finally have recognized produc........ Reads the first two sentences again.


But but I'm actually good at my job here and .... Realize I have to leave despite being good at my job and even the guy I'm helping take over after I'm gone says this sucks and he can't do it like I can and he will never be able to.....

Wonder why I'm leaving if I finally have recognized produc........ Reads the first two sentences again.

[martinuzz]

The 500 errors have been fixed, but what's up with the 504 errors we keep getting now?

[Magmacube_tr]

Forum is dying lol.

[McTraveller]

The forum server is struggling... but is the server the forum? Is it the participants? Is it the server plus participants?

AH THE PHILOSOPHY!!!

[Magmacube_tr]

Oh, stop the useless pedantry. Forum is the emergent property of both its participants and the server its hosted on.

Post count is going down, and servers are struggling. Our end is upon us.

[Eschar]

We can solve the first issue. Scoops Novel, your time has come.

Alas naturegirl is nowhere to be seen.

[Starver]

The 500 errors have been fixed, but what's up with the 504 errors we keep getting now?

Technically, 504 errors are 500 errors, just with more a solid reason given. Though I suspect that the "gone so bad that I can't really tell you what is wrong" has been fixed enough to instead get to the point of "gone bad enough, but we at least now know something more about it".

In the most 'unsolved' version of this, it was always a 504 but the "504.html" response template was missing so it fell back to the "500.html" one (as it would for 599, 542, 555, etc, assuming an otherwise random 5xx happened out of nowhere). But I choose to believe it was fixed (or 'fixed'), by the appropriate sub-daemon increasing its time-to-failure threshold until it would at least hang around long enough to get passed the Gateway reason (from the next process in the stack) and then inform us of this.

Spoiler: Rambling ramble, not adding information and probably of no use to anybody... (click to show/hide)

Without any in depth knowledge of the system being used, I can't suggest specific actions to take. Though I always got the impression that Tarn ran the server himself, I'm fairly sure it's not still a box sat in the corner of his bedroom/other-room, though I still do wonder how much connection this has with his change in life and moving... If it (as I suspect) is actually in rented rackspace (or even virtual rackspace) then I can't see his circumstances changing the server's. And there's no known software updates that could cause this ; famously, the ©2016 forum software isn't updated, but this shouldn't cause a new issue to pop up unless there's lack of forward-compatibility with some element up-/down-stream of it that has silently been that itself is bad for backward-compatability.

Could be as simple as temorarily downing the server, clearing out its /tmp or similar, perhaps do something a bit defraggy. I'd expect an announcement that this was to be done, unless the appointed admin was really sure they wouldn't hit any problems and could be back up before too many people noticed.

For a thorough job, I still think it'd be a good idea to prep a 'clone' forum machine (but fully updated, with hardware, SMF version and even location being totally new), with blank history (apart from that during testing, which gets reset anyway), give the old one a "please wait..." while the data is copied over, privately check it looks Ok and then (assuming it goes ok) redirect everyone to the new machine. (If it doesn't, undo the "please wait..." front-plate, work out what went wrong, retest with the original copyable data until it does copy, then rewipe, re"wait", re-transfer, etc.)

But it's a big job, and not Tarn's technical forté (not sure who is his support-bod for technical things, or if they're more confident about it). It's not really mine, as I've set up LAMP stacks (mostly P=Perl) and I've been in Change Control/Hardware Migration/Continuity Testing situations, but not both things together. And there's not much knowledge at all of how SMF manages things (mostly flatfiles? SQL db? YAML/JSON/XML?) or how this might have changed in the last eight years of improved back-end. Honestly, I'd be tempted to leave it alone (apart from cleaning the 'data gunk' out of its virtual oil-sump) on an "if it aint broke, don't fix it" basis.  ...yes, the 504s/500s may indicate it being 'broke', but not necessarily (and, I'd suggest, probably not!) because of it not being updated. And this is what we (or someone) really needs to look at. And I imagine that Tarn and any of his technical acquaintances have been talking about this (starting with the general thoughts of upgrading, lately adding the 5xx erroring situation) at least on a low level for a long time.

Worst case scenario, he's been relying upon SMF support fora, but everyone there is told not to answer anything from anyone using systems more than two or three sub-versions behind the latest (I know the 'reasons' why, but I've been a sufferer of such dicatorial administrative policies myself and consider it more of a lazy "wiping my hands of you" attitude than a positive attempt to keep people from lagging too far behind and keeping the current conversations 'tidy'), but probably the real issues are time. Tarn's got his now-on-Steam project to deal with, on top of his original self-imposed pressures to work on the core product, and anyone else he has relied upon over the last decade or so will also have commitments/life-events eat into their ability to maintain an active attention to the matter.