We probably have all experienced the infamous half-width/full-width issue when filling out an online form or the first/last name not accepting spaces. But what about some slightly crazier/more subtles issues that sometimes make you question the engineering in this country that you've never experienced elsewhere?
I have three to share:
1) My previous bank for my company (Hokuyou bank, a local Hokkaido bank) only accepted Windows for their online banking. You're Mac user? Too bad for you. The thing is that it was a website, so as a web engineer, I found it odd. I decided to subscribe non the less and tried to login from my Mac. Indeed, an error. So I decided to check the JavaScript (for non developers, the "code" that is run on your browser), and found that they simply had a stupid check to check the user agent (which is a "piece of code" that identifies your browser). Yeah, the first line of their JS was litteraly
`if (navigator.userAgents.includes('Macintosh') { window.location.href = '/error' }`
So I just changed the user agent and boom, could access it u_u.
2) The second one was still on a bank (this time Mitsui Sumitomo). While accessing a page to subscribe to a service, I constantly got an error 500. I thought it was maybe just down temporarily, so tried the next day, still nothing. It felt strange, so I checked what my browsers sent to the page, and as my browser is configured in French, I thought… what if it crashes BECAUSE my browser sent a "Accept-Language: FR" (here as well for non developers, it's basically a piece information your browser send to a website to indicate the language of your browser). So I changed my browser to be in Japanese and… no more error! (except that the page told me that the website was on maintenance as it was national holiday, but that's a different story).
Why did I think of this, you might ask?
3) Well, because Rakuten Travel also has a similar problem. As long as my browser is configured in French, Rakuten Travel formats badly (for some reason) all the numbers. So, for instance, the amount "34,100¥" gets formatted by Rakuten Travel to… (34?100¥) – in French, we use a space as a delimiter, so I suppose that they have badly coded code that replaces the space with a question mark). Due to this, the price is considered as "34¥" when trying to apply discount code. And because you can only apply Rakuten Points by increment of 100… well, you need to book at least 100,000¥ (which will be considered as 100¥ in French, so you can at most get 100¥ :D).
That really amazes me that such big companies can have issues like that. Handling numbers is something that is really solved for a long, long time in engineering and I've never faced such issues on any websites except Japanese ones. I can't imagine how ugly the code should be in the backend :D.
What are the craziest things that you've experienced?
by bakura10