I’m always finding broken stuff on the web. Sometimes I take the time to point these problems out to the web site owner, but mostly I just don’t have the time. However, I often find these occurrences to be useful learning experiences, and at the very least they remind me that nobody’s perfect.
So, in the vein of Mark Hurst’s “This Is Broken“, I thought I’d start keeping my own catalog of things not working as they should.
Incidentally, I called this category “501 Errors” after the error code 501 – Not Implemented. I think this part of the description for this error code captures the meaning of the category perfectly:
The server does not support the functionality required to fulfill the request.
Offender #1: Register.com
If you do a search for a domain name on Register.com but don’t enter any text into the search field, you get an error page with a friendly yellow “back” button. Too bad nobody bothered to add any functionality to it so that it would actually do anything when you clicked on it.