the worst piece of software

[Polar Bear]

Ah, memories of a truly dire piece of edu-crap which I had to use as an undergraduate to submit coursework when I was doing my Law degree at the end of the noughties.  I don't recall it's name but it was supposed to check for plagiarism, apparently.  Sometimes it simply "lost" submissions.  We did a demo for the lecturers to demonstrate it.  Thankfully it played along nicely.

I wish that I could recall it's name but my brane has completely wiped it.

[barakta]

Tribal don't give a fuck tho. I met them once when ex HE was procuring a student records system for welfare services... I asked about accessibility and Tribal salesdroids were like "UHHH *thick face* dunno".

They are now required to work towards accessibility cos of the public sector web regs but are taking their time about it.

Also anything by Oracle. Our HR system is Oracle based. It is unintuitive, confusing, slow, unreliable and also has accessibility issues. We have CPD which can't run cos there's errors that seem to be taking 12+ months to fix. It's like my current HEI didn't get a decent SLA for fixes... So you do a training course online and it glitches so it won't let you retake or deletes your mark. So you have to email HR who are drowning in these requests cos fail...

I'm sure the HR software and SITS cause more work than they save.

[barakta]

Ah, memories of a truly dire piece of edu-crap which I had to use as an undergraduate to submit coursework when I was doing my Law degree at the end of the noughties.  I don't recall it's name but it was supposed to check for plagiarism, apparently.  Sometimes it simply "lost" submissions.  We did a demo for the lecturers to demonstrate it.  Thankfully it played along nicely.

I wish that I could recall it's name but my brane has completely wiped it.

TurnItIn? That's the most famous.

It continues to be poorly accessible, buggy, unreliable and generally annoying. Great fun for my blind students when it won't work with JAWS and they have to arrange a nasty workaround where they email work to AdminPerson who then uploads it and turns off the "IT WAS LATE" alert.

[Polar Bear]

Ah, memories of a truly dire piece of edu-crap which I had to use as an undergraduate to submit coursework when I was doing my Law degree at the end of the noughties.  I don't recall it's name but it was supposed to check for plagiarism, apparently.  Sometimes it simply "lost" submissions.  We did a demo for the lecturers to demonstrate it.  Thankfully it played along nicely.

I wish that I could recall it's name but my brane has completely wiped it.

TurnItIn? That's the most famous.

It continues to be poorly accessible, buggy, unreliable and generally annoying. Great fun for my blind students when it won't work with JAWS and they have to arrange a nasty workaround where they email work to AdminPerson who then uploads it and turns off the "IT WAS LATE" alert.

Aaaaaaaaargh!

You've triggered raging anxiety here now.  Dark room ...

Thanks for that, I think.  🤔  😉

Yes, I recall now.  We used to refer to it as Turditin.

[ian]

I think the only developers who do accessibility when they are not forced to are Apple and they have a pile of cash so high you couldn't climb it even with a support crew and supplementary oxygen.

[TheLurker]

Kim > Honourable mention to LibreOffice or whatever it's called this month...
Can't speak for the spreadsheet (calc?) or death-by-slide app, but Writer is pretty good these days.  *Far* better than any of the incarnations of M$ Word I use At Work.

Beardy > ...MS Project...
Hah! Try writing software to export and import Project files.  I've ranted about it somewhere on this board previously.

My nomination is Visual Studio Code.  To misquote DA, "Almost, but not entirely, unlike Visual Studio."  Which, if you've spent most of the last 30 years using one variety or another of VS, is a very special sort of irritating.

[gibbo]

The company I work for uses this software called Agile PLM. It's a product lifecycle management thingy that we use to control drawing revisions among other things. I've used it daily for the last 3 years and hate it with a passion! IMO it eclipses any MS product I've used.

[ian]

Jira and Confluence are pretty shit. Well, they're not pretty come to think of it. So let's just go with shit.

[Lightning Phil]

Not even subscription software just apps that won’t show data without an internet connection.  An example is the BBC weather app on iPad.  It won’t show you the weather forecast from last time you had a connection. Oh no, you actually need a connection for anything to show at all.

Presumably its just a web browser in a fancy wrapper.

Even if a wrapper for a web browser kit.  Offline support has been part of the web standards and browser specifications for some time. All browsers in last decade have the support and capability if the developer can be bothered.

[Lightning Phil]

Artemis which was a time sheet recording and reporting system used by a company I used to work for. Absolute crock of shoot.

[Clare]

Ah, memories of a truly dire piece of edu-crap which I had to use as an undergraduate to submit coursework when I was doing my Law degree at the end of the noughties.  I don't recall it's name but it was supposed to check for plagiarism, apparently.  Sometimes it simply "lost" submissions.  We did a demo for the lecturers to demonstrate it.  Thankfully it played along nicely.

I wish that I could recall it's name but my brane has completely wiped it.

TurnItIn? That's the most famous.

Ahhh, Turnitin another Pile o'shite. We have to submit most of our students' work submissions to it because either it isn't working for them or whatever security barrier their web interface is hiding behind doesn't trust Turnitin. However, it did pick up a blatant bit of plagiarism with a 100% hit for one piece of work submitted to a northern ex-polytechnic. The guilty student responded to say they had submitted the wrong piece of work and sent another with a 0% plagiarism score. A brief scan of the first paragraph of each piece confirmed that the second submission was the result of the first submission having been put through sinister buttocks software.

[Lightning Phil]

My nomination is Visual Studio Code.  To misquote DA, "Almost, but not entirely, unlike Visual Studio."  Which, if you've spent most of the last 30 years using one variety or another of VS, is a very special sort of irritating.

I actually quite like Visual Studio Code and prefer it over Visual Studio.   Visual Studio has become bloatware in the same way Word / Office.   I find Code lightweight, with a clean easy to use intuitive (to me) interface with plenty of plugins to add the additional functionality I want without the stuff I don’t.

[Beardy]

Arggghh. Jira was the pile of crap that our “agile” requirements capture was written on. How anyone could even begin to think it was fit for purpose I really REALLY don’t know. Trying to do ANY sort of BI data capture from it was just about impossible.

And MS Project. I do hate it with a passion, but when the business decided that we PMs didn’t need it and could instead use Sharepoint (i kid you not) I realised just how much of a visual learner I was and that being able to produce simple Gantt charts was one thing MS ‘project could do. Just don’t try and balance resources with it.

[Afasoas]

I'll nominate Chrome. And every piece of software built on top of it.

Multiple reasons for this:

1. It is a still reasource hungry, althougn not as bad as it used to be
2. A browser developed by a company responsible for raising most of its revenue through advertising is not a small conflict of interest
3. Continuing on the same theme, sheer dominance of Alphabet/Google and Chrome puts is not a good thing for web standards - see Google's recent attempts to replace Cookies
4. Sheer market dominance - nearly every other browser is based on it, as well as applications ranging from the slack desktop app to visual studio code
5. Security around browser extensions is still very lax and the market place is poorly policed
6. It breaks in lots of mysterious and wonderful ways - oftimes I've deleted user profiles to get it working again

[Beardy]

I think I’ve used Chrome perhaps two or three times and then only on Dr Beardy’s work laptop.

I might have to think about downloading it to test a website I’m building, though I might just try and use Dr Beardy’s laptop for that as well   

[Kim]

Chrome is the new IE6 (which was a strong contender in the 'worst piece of software' stakes)

[Tim Hall]

I've never managed to figure out why, when you do a copy & paste in Outlook Express, it changes the font and the format.
Is this some sort of advantage that I've never really appreciated?

This comes from something in windows and outlook express, it too does my head in. Here's a VERY basic explanation! (so don't @ me) It takes the settings - font/colour - from the person who send you the email, mix it up with the settings you got. It also depends on if they or you have emails set to HTML or not etc.

I really do hate it when you copy some text from one place and past it to another it takes all the setting on Program A and dump it into Program B. Why! I'm copying the text not the the fancy colours and fonts, which I don't care about, I care only about the text since that is what I'm copying.

One way to bypass that is hitting "ctrl + shift + v" when pasting. Or the good old basic text editor trick, paste into that and copy away from it.

Though in Outlook 365 or what ever it's called now you can't (well I haven't found a way around that) and have to use the extra step to paste, click one of the 2-3 options (dunno know what that is called). It's kinda ok and nice as it give you the option to paste as the Program A, paste as Program B, paste as plain text only. But an annoying extra step or two.

<Waves a tearful farewell to the good ship Plain Text Email which sailed so long ago it's well over the horizon>

[FifeingEejit]

Jira and Confluence are pretty shit. Well, they're not pretty come to think of it. So let's just go with shit.

Amazingly I'm going to object to that.

The latest version we've got links everything together nicely, and as a dev who doesn't have to administer it, it's good enough.
I did have to briefly administer our previous one when setting up our SVN workflow stage requests (i.e. create me a repository, create me a branch etc) and came to conclusion that if you start working with it on the basis that it's all backwards (permissions come from the layer directly out from the one you're in) then it makes sense, just... where as if it's been initially set up on the basis of normal permissions where they're set at each level, well you're in for a nightmare...
Our aging SVN server and a quick demo of GitLab brought everyone else round... And of course GitLab if we pay for it does all the stuff Jira, Confluence, Fisheye and Crucible do in a much more integrated manner, so my next path on GitLab world domination is to find a different excuse to pay for it and then sayh "so why are we paying for all of these that duplicate what this can do"

I'll nominate Chrome. And every piece of software built on top of it.

Multiple reasons for this:

1. It is a still reasource hungry, althougn not as bad as it used to be
2. A browser developed by a company responsible for raising most of its revenue through advertising is not a small conflict of interest
3. Continuing on the same theme, sheer dominance of Alphabet/Google and Chrome puts is not a good thing for web standards - see Google's recent attempts to replace Cookies
4. Sheer market dominance - nearly every other browser is based on it, as well as applications ranging from the slack desktop app to visual studio code
5. Security around browser extensions is still very lax and the market place is poorly policed
6. It breaks in lots of mysterious and wonderful ways - oftimes I've deleted user profiles to get it working again

So that's every modern web browser except for Mozilla Firefox then... (wait I said modern...)
Safari, Edge, Opera etc, all share code base at some level with Chrome, in fact Edge is the lead browser of the Chromium project for Windows, what goes into it this week will eventually make its way into Opera and Chrome.

So lynx yeah?

[Pingu]

If OSs count then the worst I ever had to deal with was Windows ME. Crashed at the merest hint of mentioning headware in decline.

The worst at 'work' at the mo is Agresso (or Unit4 whatever). I mean, decimal time, WTF 

[Beardy]

DOS 4 was a bad thing and Windows Vista should never have been compiled!

[Kim]

The worst at 'work' at the mo is Agresso (or Unit4 whatever). I mean, decimal time, WTF 

There's decimal time and there's decimal time, thobut...

It's perfectly sensible when you're counting in seconds or milliseconds (preferably from power-up or January 1970 or something).  Excel's fractions-of-a-day probably makes sense if you're jibbling about with dates, even if it's a pain the rest of the time.  Decimal hours, on the other hand, are offensive and should be banned (I'm suspicious they're what you get when you let the HR department write specifications for things).

[Pingu]

It's being required to enter 6 and three quarter hours as 6.75, c'mon

[robgul]

Moving on to web CMS I nominate DRUPAL as totally incomprehensible (I think it was made so counter-intuitive that the potential users had to employ someone with specific DRUPAL "skills" - and those people would only "do it my way")

Other, simple, CMS products abound

[DaveReading]

<Waves a tearful farewell to the good ship Plain Text Email which sailed so long ago it's well over the horizon>

I send plain text emails more often than not.

More importantly, my email client opens all mails as plain text so that I can then decide whether or not I want to view them as HTML.

[Mr Larrington]

Moving on to web CMS I nominate DRUPAL as totally incomprehensible (I think it was made so counter-intuitive that the potential users had to employ someone with specific DRUPAL "skills" - and those people would only "do it my way")

Other, simple, CMS products abound

Moving onto having to employ people with specific l33t 5k1llz0rz, let's hear a big round of applause for SAP!