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23/05/06 O2 Ireland and the Internet.
UPDATE: 8/7/06 - Over 1.5 months after launching the new site. It’s still really really slow. I’m unable to delete contact from ‘Webtext phonebook’. Delete button returns error “Select a contact first”.
UPDATE: 29/05/06 17:53hrs - Liam McAvinue has left a comment.
When I finally managed to re-register, I entered a text. It seems to be the correct phonebook, but there is no SEND button!
It seems all is still not well.
I’m also very irritated with the index page http://www.o2.ie appearing like you’re logged out when you go to it when you’re logged in. Also, who ever heard of a cross between a 24hr and 12hr clock… it reads ‘05:55pm’ now. That’s just wrong.
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UPDATE: 27/05 22:50hrs - Ken at Event Ireland is having problems now too. His account has someone else’s phone book in it! Uh oh.
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UPDATE: 20:47hrs - O2 are now displaying another message.
Was I right or was I right about this going wrong! (see original post.).
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UPDATE: 19:36hrs - I still havn’t managed to login successfully, and comments are starting to appear here from other bloggers with registration problems now (See Justin’s comment below). At this stage a login attempt gives back the following error:
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UPDATE: 17:24hrs - That took 5 minutes for the ‘re-register’ page to post though. It’s very very slow, and I doubt it’s due to a rush of customers all checking it out.
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UPDATE: 17:08hrs - Looks like it’s gone live. But is unbelievably slow. “To login you need to register, even if you were registered before.” This is unreal.
O2.ie is now faster, safer and easier to use.
No, I think you’ll find it’s allot slower. Infact your image telling me this, hasn’t even loaded fully yet.
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UPDATE: 16:47hrs - And it still reads…
Oh dear! Almost 1hr late.
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Previously:
Back in October I found a massive loophole in the O2 website that let me acquire anyone’s O2 password, once I knew their username. It never made the press, even though I could look up peoples bills, calls, add packages to their accounts, top their phone up with €250 from thier bank account… you name it.
It took them 48hrs to even read my email to them after threatening to go to the press unless my information was secured. I was promised a call back to tell me the fix had been made, but guess what… I’m still waiting. (Although I saw my recommendation has been implemented a week later).
I saw last week they were planning to take their website offline for Monday to launch their new one by start of business today. My initial reaction was one of surprise to see they weren’t doing this over a weekend when businesses are shut, maybe start the transfer at 2am on Saturday morning as I do when doing a large transition site. Do it when traffic is minimal.
Obviously things didn’t go to plan, this morning read “Please come back at 10am”. A brief check now reveals a message “The new improved site will be available today from 4pm.”… and it’s now 25 minutes past 4pm.
I suspect we are being brought up in line with their other international O2 sites. Ireland have always had a scaled down home-brew version of O2 UK and O2 DE. The UK one was re-launched last week and it’s hideous and the German one looks even less usable.
God only knows what we’ll get in Ireland. I’ll update this post after launch.
Tags: General, Network Security & Administration, Observations
9 Comments
I have my fingers crossed — god only knows why. You _know_ it’s going to be a crappy copy of the UK one :(
BTW, running an open URL redirector is dangerous nowadays. Are you checking target URLs against SURBL ( http://surbl.org/ )?
wow. pretty amazing bug. ;)
It’s almost up — but when I try to re-register (as we have to now), I fill out the massive questionnaire page, hit submit — and it comes back and says “there’s been an error”. So I try again, and it tells me that “that email address [ie. username at o2.ie] is already taken”.
So I change the email address, and try again — and the same thing happens. And again, this time with a _quite_ improbable address…
the damn backend is getting halfway through the transaction, then breaking halfway through, but with data committed to disk.
Brilliant!
Thanks Justin!
Looking into SURBL now! cheers,
Ah god bless them and their little changeover (sarc)… made it as far as registering at midnight last night and that was it, site fell over once I was in….
27/05/06 Follow up to how many (Irish) bloggers does it take to change a light bulb? at Piaras Kelly PR - Irish Public Relations
[...] Blogging isn’t going to bring down traditional media, it is its own medium. I don’t read blogs instead of newspapers. The past seven days have seen some really interesting things published, including informative guides, stories that don’t get picked up in the media and highly personal topics. It’s amazing to think that this form of communication didn’t really exist five years ago. Don’t get caught up in the hype though, sometimes our close knit community can be far too insular. [...]
That phone book issue seems to have been sorted…. now its 11:18… thats pretty much all of the day it was like that for me!
29/05/06 Liam McAvinue
The new site is even worse than the old one. When I finally managed to re-register, I entered a text. It seems to be the correct phonebook, but there is no SEND button!
hahaha..
31/10/06 David
This conversation above is 5 months ago but just signed up with O2 and the website is very fragile. I can sometimes use the free SMS service but 50% of the time it just crashes. Maybe someone from O2 is listening?
