It's so good, we use it ourselves

phillup on 2005-04-01T20:21:50

I saw an entry in FreshMeat that sounded interesting. When I went to the home page for the software I saw two statements that were a bit interesting to me:

A GPL'd drop down menu that is so good that even we use it.
and
It's about time that someone released an open source drop down menu that actually works!


Why did I find them interesting? Well... the drop down menus on the site don't work for me. That's why.

(Mozilla 1.7.6 on OSX 1.3.7)


Its so bad, we use it ourselves!

schwern on 2005-04-02T11:08:10

I tried it with Firefox 1.0.2 on OS X. Didn't work for me either. The leftmost menu worked but the other two disappeared as soon as I tried to mouse down into the menu.

So I dutifully tried to submit a bug report via their "contact us" page. I guess this is using their FORMFields interface. To start, the form to write the message in is, for some reason, 52 x 11. Not only is it tiny, its not even a size that makes sense.

To make matters worse they limit you to 500 characters. There's a helpful little character counter to tell you how many they have left. To fully describe the behavior I was seeing required just a bit over 500 characters. Adding to the fun, when I did hit 500 characters the text area bounced up and down from the top to the bottom again in a rather confusing way.

Finally I trimmed the report back to a bit less than 500 characters and submitted only to get back "You used more than 500 characters" with a character count of -16. Wha?! Turns out they backslashed every non-alphanumeric character in the text and subject and then counted those characters against me. Ok... chop off some more of the report and resubmit. Again, "You used more than 500 characters". This time they backslashed every blackslash!

At this point I gave up.