The other day, my bank texted me to say there was a suspicious charge on my credit card and did I make it. When I responded that I didn’t, they invalidated the card and sent me another. I hate when that happens. Not because getting the new card is at all a problem. It isn’t. The problem comes when I start getting emails from all my services saying that when they tried to charge me for the monthly fee, the credit card was declined.
First up was ExpressVPN, a company that I’ve been very happy with and about whom I’ve had only good things to say. The problem came where it always does: entering the new credit card number. ExpressVPN has no instructions or restrictions for this. Just enter the number. Like most people, I find it a lot easier to enter the number as four groups of four digits—just the way it is on the card. The entry field allowed this so I thought I was good. Of course I wasn’t. I got an error message that blanks and other punctuation weren’t allowed. Not too bad: I reentered the number without spaces and all was good. I wanted to yell at them about it but, of course, there was no way of doing that other than a live chat so I gave up and got on with my day.
The next morning, I got another notice, this time from Earthlink. It’s an old account that I maintain only to support the Web pages for my books. Again, there were no instructions or restrictions for the new credit card number. The site allowed me to enter the number in a human friendly way but when I tried to save the update I got an error message saying that I needed to choose the card type. There was no way to do that. The card type is chosen automatically based on the number so I canceled the update and started over. Of course the same thing happened. After messing around for several minutes, I tried entering the number without spaces. Success! So Earthlink not only doesn’t tell you the required format, they give you an erroneous error message when you get it wrong.
Look, none of this is hard. Javascript makes it easy to strip blanks with
string.split(" ").join("")
or using the more general replace that can handle other unwanted characters. I don’t write in Javascript and even I know this. Why are these sites torturing their users by not handling this? If the underqualified developers they having building their Web pages find this too difficult, could they at least specify what they’re expecting? There really is no excuse for this and it’s not a new problem. I and others have been complaining about it for years but nothing ever changes.