

It's not the $7, but the principle - vilpponen
http://antti.vilpponen.net/2013/08/31/its-not-the-7-but-the-principle/

======
jhdevos
Does seem like an 'honest' bug. I did what the OP did (except I checked the
middle option), and when you then look at the source of the page, it includes

    
    
      <div style="margin:20px 10px 32px 0px;padding:0;background-color:#eeeeee;border-bottom:#cccccc 1px solid; width:220px; height:300px; background:url(images/print-int-2013.png) no-repeat; float:left;"><input name="cds_term_value" type="radio" id="radio" value="1"  style="margin-top:138px;margin-left:10px;" /></div>
      <div style="margin:20px 10px 32px 0px;padding:0;background-color:#eeeeee;border-bottom:#cccccc 1px solid; width:220px; height:300px; background:url(images/digital-int-2013-v2.png) no-repeat; float:left;"><input name="cds_term_value" type="radio" id="radio" value="2" CHECKED style="margin-top:138px;margin-left:10px;" /></div>
      <div style="margin:20px 10px 32px 0px;padding:0;background-color:#eeeeee;border-bottom:#cccccc 1px solid; width:220px; height:300px; background:url(images/bundle-int-2013.png) no-repeat; float:left;"><input name="cds_term_value" type="radio" id="radio" value="3"  style="margin-top:138px;margin-left:10px;" checked="" /></div>
    

The 'div' that you had checked earliers has an empty 'CHECKED' attribute,
while the third one has the 'checked=""' that firefox apparently picks up.

~~~
runarb
Agree. The author is jumping to conclusions her. Remind me of this great
quote:

"Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by
incompetence" \- Napoleon Bonaparte

~~~
frankydp
Probably not a Bonaparte quote. The below is an interesting history of how
that quote got into the hacker consciousness. Mostly from the Jargon file.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)

~~~
samatman
I had never read that! Charming. The punchline is, it's actually Heinlein's
razor. Which makes perfect sense.

(yes the wiki refers to a Robert Hanlon of Scranton, PA. This is probably only
amusing if you're from America and know that Scranton is the archetypal funny
place to be from)

~~~
derleth
> Scranton is the archetypal funny place to be from

Up there with Walla Walla, Washington and Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

------
pwg
From the article: " I entered my credit card number with spacing like 1234
1234 1234 1234 and all the other information as necessary. After I clicked
“Submit your order”, the form returned an error and asked me to fix the credit
card number so that there are no spaces ..."

Why do so many web developers insist on forcing me to enter a 16 digit number
_without_ spaces when a computer is excellent (and fast) at removal of spaces
and I am not so good at validating I've typed a 16 digit number correctly when
that number lacks the spaces?

~~~
weaksauce
A lot of programmers are terrible at their craft.

~~~
mixmastamyk
And/or management that doesn't allow devs to spend time on user-friendly
features.

~~~
nucleardog
Really? You think management is standing over the programmer's shoulder going
"Whoa whoa whoa... the length validation was acceptable, but removing spaces
for them? _Simply indulgence_. Just throw an error."

In any case I can imagine it would take less or equivalent code and time to do
a string replacement than handle generating and reporting the error. In my
experience, it's primarily been inexperienced programmers.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Not exactly. Typically it would be to keep them so busy as to never have time
to get to it. If you don't actually use the feature it's not gonna be a
priority.

Also, in some places you are not allowed to check in code without a ticket or
req number. When you check in on your own you commit qa and others to support
it, and other devs to maintain it. Big bureaucracy sucks but exists and
sometimes even has good reasons.

This is a trivial example though, but you get my drift. I agree it sucks, just
trying to explain how it happens.

------
chx
Oh my god, how I hate forms that reset themselves over an error! It's
newsletter subscriptions... or the misc textarea... or something... that gets
lost when I enter a Canadian post code with the space in the middle. Or
without the space in the middle. Both have triggered errors :(

Why can't you people just use Drupal which has a forms system that I have
contributed to a lot and it handles rebuilds like this with ease :) ?

~~~
Spidler
Because drupal does a lot of other things "interestingly", for example account
name and email-validation?

~~~
seszett
What's so bad about account name an email validation in Drupal? It's one of
the few apps/CMS/frameworks that get it right and allow people to use their
real name instead of forcing them to come up with some poor ASCII-only string
to represent them.

------
ruswick
There's no evidence to suggest that this was malicious in any way, nor
anything to suggest that FC intended to "trick" him. Plenty of service
implement these types of defaults, and bugs occasionally happen.

He's taking a presumptuous "principled" stand against something that is not
necessarily an ethical issue. Sometimes shit just breaks. He has no idea
whether there was any malicious intent, nor has he even finished dealing with
FC customer service. (I bet they'll give him a refund.)

He is writing a screed based on an unproven assumption about an incident that
will probably be amended by FC. This seems like linkbait.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The company's web page is their agent to the web world. No matter why that
agent cheated this guy; its the companies fault. That's how agency works.

Sure we as engineers can diagnose what web error caused the issue. But we can
also surely imagine its not the first time tech support has handled the
matter, and its still a problem.

At this point there is plenty to blame the company for, even with a liberal
tolerance for incompetence. Why not fix the bug? Its easy to not fix a bug
that's raking in money.

To be called a responsible company, they have to fix those bugs FIRST.

------
stretchwithme
Could be something to report to submissions@darkpatterns.org

    
    
      http://darkpatterns.org/submit_a_pattern/

------
bartl
This might be subject to a chargeback. After all, they "sold", and charged,
you something without your consent, didn't they?

~~~
gommm
I'm not sure how it is in Finland but here in France it's very difficult to do
a chargeback... I tried once for something that was never delivered and my
bank blew me off. It's nowhere as easy as in the US.

It's not even that that I lost the chargeback, it's that they didn't even let
me initiate it.

~~~
MayankGoyal
You'll need to jump through some hoops for that. Here in India, the bank's
credit card department head didn't even know about chargebacks, and didn't
believe me even after I showed him the Visa Regulations on Visa's website. I
had to call customer care over 10 times and talk to the supervisors nearly
every time before I found a person who was able to send me the chargeback
form. Hell, the bank's local branch didn't believe me even after seeing the
chargeback form.

After I got the chargeback form though, dealing with the Chargeback Department
was a breeze.

~~~
straight_talk_2
Very interesting. I remember back in the late 60s and 70s when credit card
adoption raised in the US, charge back was a key selling feature. Customers
refused to use cards that didn't offer it.

Makes me wonder how the world is going to change when BRIC economies get
bigger than the current "developed" ones (if ever). Banks and other
oligopolies may get away with far lower customer, privacy, heath, etc.
protection.

------
masnick
Why is this on the front page? It sounds like a bug with a web form and a
problem with non-responsive customer service, neither of which are uncommon.

~~~
ruswick
Because people would rather believe a provocative falsehood than accept a
benign truth.

~~~
mwfunk
This one's going in the quote bank. So, so true.

------
cabirum
It's not like they intentionally "tricked you" into buying something, it was
just a bug in a web form. Bugs happen.

~~~
PeterisP
But you're responsible for your bugs, so it's their job to offer easy refunds
in that case.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Indeed, but the article doesn't say they refused a refund. The bug seems
deeper than just their front end, their back-end is showing the "wrong"
(actually right) subscription selected, but their payment provider clearly
charged for the wrong one.

So I guess they now need to consolidate their payments received (likely via a
payment provider) with their own system to see if this or any other orders are
inconsistent.

They should refund the OP, and I suspect we'll see them do just that. But they
also need to both fix their front end but also add automated systems to
consolidate payments with orders to see if they match.

~~~
vilpponen
OP here. They haven't refused of a refund per se, but since I am unable to
reach them with the second request - it is comparable to "let's leave this be
and maybe it will go away".

~~~
jeffclark
If it's really just a front-end bug, chances are they're getting lots of calls
just like yours. You may just be part of a pile of callback tickets once the
bug is fixed and all the refunds are processed. Or, they could still be trying
to track down the root cause of the bug in the first place.

------
tghw
Seems like a clear case for Hanlon's Razor:

 _Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity_

------
blackjack160
It might be a bug, but the networksolutions.com checkout process also acts
opportunistically when you add a domain to a new account. It will ask if you
want to 'auto-renew the purchased domains AND all others you previously
purchased'. If you change the setting to 'don't auto-renew' and then make a
validation error (miss the terms of service checkbox), it will keep state for
all other fields, but magically the auto-renew value switches back to the
default.

------
UVB-76
Both parties are clearly in the wrong here.

Fast Company should ensure the product selection doesn't reset to default when
the form is submitted and returns an error.

The customer should double-check their order before hitting submit. Like it or
not, they had the more expensive product selected when they submitted their
order. How are Fast Company supposed to know the product you had selected is
not the product you wanted?

~~~
vilpponen
Naturally the user is always responsible for the purchase he/she makes.
However, if I (OP) make my selections and need to re-enter some information
based on their request - I don't think that allows them to change my decisions
from what I have chosen earlier, especially if you get an error message
similar to "please check your credit card number".

It is also a de facto standard in general that sites do not change once set
selections when fixing errors in the original form and once you differ from
this you're bound to increase burden on your customer support.

~~~
UVB-76
Precisely. It's bad practice on the part of the retailer, and if I were in
their shoes I'd refund the customer immediately as a gesture of goodwill.

That said, it does not appear to be malicious, and ultimately the customer
bears some responsibility for submitting their order without checking it.

------
philhippus
Here's a gold mine that will pay out for years, perhaps decades. Let's nuke
the mine and get an extra 1/5th on the first payout, sacrificing all future
gains. Real smart there boys.

~~~
philhippus
Someone downvoted me. Probably didn't get the analogy, so I'll spell it out.
The gold mine = a subscriber. The nuking of said mine = fleecing the
subscriber on his/her first payment and thus losing the subscription.

------
ahoge
Well, "tricked"... sounds more like a silly bug to me. Stuff like this is easy
to miss during testing, because you test these things in isolation.

~~~
ineedtosleep
It's very unlikely that this is a bug.

There is no reason that that a failed form validation would save the states of
all the input fields EXCEPT the bundle selector.

~~~
gkoberger
Radio buttons are more prone to logical errors than normal fields, just due to
the way they work. They're not rocket scientist hard, but they're totally "I
didn't have enough coffee and screwed up the logic" hard.

------
epo
Whenever anyone says "It's not x, it's the principle", it's x, it's always x.

~~~
ciclista
Not really. I had a similar issues a while ago. Paid $5 for a test account
(vps), customer rep lied to me about some issues then refused to refund. The
$5 really wasn't worth my time, but I don't appreciate being lied to and
having my time wasted, so I made sure make some public complaints on Twitter
(after no response through their ticketing service).

So yes, it can be about the principle.

------
rmc
Chargeback time. That action on their part might be viewed as fraud.

~~~
jonknee
Actually it would be fraudulent to not charge what was selected to be ordered.
It was a bug that didn't save the selection properly (possibly just in Firefox
too, the template didn't look _that_ bad), but it was perfectly visible what
was selected when the OP made the order.

~~~
rmc
IANAL, but this gets complicated. It all depends on whether a reasonable
person, when seeing the error page with "no spaces in credit card field",
would presume that nothing else in the form changed. If so, and the merchant
is aware that most people presume that, then it could be fraud.

They are making a financial gain, by being aware that the terms have changed,
and by misleading the customer into thinking that nothing has changed, they
could be committing fraud.

The customer choose the original selection, and the merchant's systems swapped
in a different, more expensive, version without telling the customer at the
last moment, knowing that most people don't re-read everything again, then
yes, that's fraud.

~~~
arjie
In addition, they claim that he purchased the 32.99 subscription. That step is
unethical plain and simple. If you take 20 dollars from me and then claim I
only paid 10, you bet it's going to look bad.

