I manage probably a dozen servers for work, except that unlike a private board like this one, all my users are technically customers and the customer is supposed to be always right. I would get in trouble for even saying “please don’t do that” to a user. So if they break something, it’s on me to figure out how to stop them from doing that in the future. Oh I wish that I could sometimes IP ban the ones who don’t listen haha. Sometimes the best I can do is disable a feature that users seem intent on breaking.
What kind of features do they break or keep doing?
They are all insurance quoting, policy management and claims systems. As you can imagine, systems like these have a lot of moving parts, so on any given day my users could have a problem printing, with the rates … anything.
One of these systems is over 10 years old and was written completely half-assed by someone who is long gone, and a couple weeks ago a user entered a bad underwriter into the system right before she left for the day. There’s a 3 digit code, and the user mistakenly entered in a 9 digit code and it brought the entire system down! Of course it happened to be on a day I was out sick and they started spamming all my phones, email, wife’s phone, etc., until I drug my sorry ass out of bed and spent 6 hours late at night trying to figure out what they did to bring the system down. It was a stroke of luck I even figured out where the problem was without it taking all night. Where do you put ‘leap of intuition’ in the troubleshooting manual. That’s just one happy example 
I hope you got overtime for that
I’m salaried, so I didn’t even get a ‘thank you’. But there’s a flip side to that: when I got a freak case viral encephalitis and stroked out one morning at breakfast, the paychecks kept rolling in for the two months I was out
But thank yous don’t cost a dime, that bugs me
At least the financial karma worked in your favour in the end (hopefully not an actual stroke though)
Yeah. That’s one of the things I’ve learned in my old age: simple human kindness doesn’t cost anything but has a huge value. And yeah, it was a real stroke where I had to endure “who is the president?” and “what year is it?” for several weeks until I stopped saying “Clinton” and referring to my wife as “that woman who keeps following me around.”
Are you sure those two things are not connected 
Sorry, couldn’t resist
Sorry to dive into the well of Logic, but it really isn’t the responsibility of the middleware to do that, but the browser (or even the OS) itself, which finally interacts with your particular system configuration.
Strangely enough, Firefox and Thunderbird already do this, they just do it very poorly and very inconsistently.
I blame “CSS”. “Style” Sheets, especially when created by mindless cup-pissers who have no “style” to offer the rest of us, alter the browser’s behavior to a radical, and sometimes irredeemably hideous degree, to the point where my most commonly used Firefox menu item is View~~Page Style~~>No Style, usually merely to learn whether the Content is actually worth reading in the first place. I have no idea what Microsoft’s browser does with them, as I only use that for Windows Updates.
I wonder if that might help here… BRB…
We still laugh about it now. The first night they told my wife I wasn’t going to make it and to start making ‘arrangements’. I was also a very bad boy and it took the entire staff to subdue a large naked man intent on going outside for a cigarette, even though I had no cigarettes or lighter. I woke up strapped to a gurney with everyone saying “you’ve been very naughty”. I also pulled out my picc line which they said should’ve also killed me.
Since everyone I knew was there and I was a raving, brain-damaged lunatic, I still hear stories of the wack sh*t I was saying to people and some funny stories. Some folks here know about my addiction to nice watches, and one of the doctors had an Omega Seamaster—the old school James Bond version. So when they needed to calm me down, they had that doctor come over and wave the Omega in front of me and the wife says it was like the gorilla that becomes docile when it hears the harp.
Another funny story is that once I was able to answer basic questions about my surroundings, they had a fun tine asking me questions they themselves didn’t know the answer to and I apparently I was giving them idiot-savant type answers and everyone was amused that I was answering questions on such a wide range of topics.
I only have vague memories of the whole experience but it was 5 years ago this August and I haven’t had a cigarette since then, so in some twisted way it was worth it because I feel fantastic as a non-smoker.
Nevermind… “No Style” didn’t help at all. It even tosses the middleware’s bold italic strike-through, etc., which made the extra silly requirements at the end of the Giveaway NOT appear funny but as real as the rest.
Hmmmm….
What Century was it, again?? And we’re supposed to all love this “Graphical” interface?
Glad you brought this up, Bort, but it’s a major frustration to me too, in more than just this forum, more than just the WWWeb.
That is quite the scary adventure, glad you made it through, if you don’t mind me asking what kind of questions were you answering about the wide range of topics?
It’s not rocket science. There’s any number of technical and process-based solutions, such as “don’t do that!” But I’m with Bort that it’s not fair to scold users over problems that have a technical solution.
Thanks I do know I was fixing all their computer problems. And I know that “who is president?” turned into “who is speaker of the house?” and things like “who is chair of the intelligence sub-committee?” and and questions I didn’t think I knew because I’m not into politics. I vaguely remember some history questions. The brain damage wasted my short term memory but gave a boost to my long term memory. Now I’m like the absentminded professor. Oh, and everyone says I’m more grumpy now 
I’ve heard a few theories that we store all the information we are exposed to but our memory parses it and only allows us to bring up ‘important’ sections but i have seen a few examples of what you describe
I can also remember hundreds of dreams when I’m awake. It’s like a picture book I can thumb through just by thinking of it, which gives me a certain perspective on the subject that I don’t think most people have. For example, there’s a continuity to them, almost like story threads in a novel, and the act of dreaming advances the plot of whatever thread I’m dreaming about. I’m not a doctor/neuro-biologist but my personal experience seems to go against some of the established science. Either way, almost dying taught me that life is grand and we should live every day to the fullest. More flashlights!
I just found you the ultimate solution, just posted today (a few hours ago in fact)
Hmm interesting. The article speaks the truth. I do get bored with them after a while, which is why I started buying cheap ones—it extends and multiplies that magical feeling. I also sold most of the high end ones and now I just have a Tag Heuer and the medium-end Movado. Not sure I’d want to rent one, though.
Another forum I go to uses vBulletin software and large embedded images are resized so they don’t overspill or break tables. Smaller images are unaffected.
I was thinking of a stylesheet override but it has many limitations with generated pages. Something like the vBulletin approach would be better.
There are websites that just don’t allow images above 800 pixels wide. It’s down to the user to make sure the image fits the template.
Maybe that could be implemented here? It is not hard to add a link for a larger photo to open in a new tab/window, when it is necessary to post very large pics (charger PCB for example).