Today I had a web site owner yelling at me that he never should have used DNN and that a PHP solution would have been best.  Turns out the reason is that his employees were using the First Name field of a customer's profile to record the full name and the Last Name field for comments about that customer.  So naturally, they just sent out several hundred emails addressed to "John Smith Pays Late" and "Jane Doe Smells Funny", only mostly less flattering.  And it's not DNN that's at fault anyway, I've seen something similar happen many times over the years.

I advised him to apologize profusely, blame it on a disgruntled developer that has been fired and offer them some sort of carrot like free shipping on their next order.  Fortunately, I didn't do the training for them, or even set up the site.  I just had to fix skins and layouts so they worked in browsers that weren't Internet Exploer 6 at 1280 x 1024 pixels.  Unfortunately, he didn't elect to pay me for a couple hours of training his staff and he's just going to tell them to delete all the comments.  I didn't offer to wipe the last name fields with a SQL script because I knew he'd want it free and then blame me the next time hist staff couldn't understand a program.

How ambiguous are data fields with titles like "First Name" and "Last Name" anyway?

Jeff

Believe me I've had this many times, no doubt other people have... ever since the "anykey" was invented life is always an uphill struggle.

Only today I was told off by somebody by being "too technical" when I explained I just needed to know which part of a web page would they want to be editable, and which user/dept would edit it (a pretty simple question I thought).... from a company who replaced me and DNN with a Perl based solution!

... so it all depends on the culture of the company and whether or not they have anything called "good management".

Often bad mangement loves to blame anyone or anything..... generally anyone remotely connected to an IT system will do... that allows them consider themselves feeling powerful enough to continue making bad decisions rather than get advise from "nerds" :-).

NB why were staff writing these comments in the database, surely they should be the ones who should get a whipping, and why didn't management check to see that they were updating records properly?

Glad I'm not the only one, though I'm sorry about your experiences.  I guess sharing it makes it funny?!?!

Here's what I get - repeated e-mails "why can't I search the database?"

Answer..."Ummm, because you're not logged in."

Rather than hoping users can see the tiny log-in in the DNN default, I have a giant log-in link with a graphic next to it, explanatory text on the home page and everything.  Sheesh.