ODIN Blog

There is this site, which had some very archaic code, which blocked Opera. Incidentally, that site is very big in India, and consequently, was India's most reported site compatibility problem regarding Opera. We quickly figured out what was wrong in the JavaScript code, and now it was only a matter of letting them know what's wrong so that they fix it and unblock Opera.

They had contact information on their site. First I tried their online contact form. No response. A few days later, I tried another contact form, again no response. Hmmm....

Then I found out a few email addresses. I wrote to them, including their webmaster address. Still no response. Then I thought, I might as well give them a call. On the phone, the person asked me to write to a different email address, so I did that. Still days later no response Called again, and finally got the number of the project manager of the site, and discussed the solution with him. He seemed supportive, and gave his personal email address, and requested me to email him with the solution again. Did that. Still no cigar!

A few more calls were made, with promises that the site would get fixed. Nothing happened. My only last hope was to meet them face to face.

I was going to that city in the near future for some conferences, and I thought I'll stop by their office as well. Well, the site in question belongs to a large financial entity, and had a LOT of security at their headquarters. They scanned me, my wallet, my bag, my laptop, made a note of which laptop i was carrying, verified with the people I was going to meet that I indeed was scheduled to meet them, and gave me a slip which I had to sign from the people and hand it out to the security when I walked out the building as proof that I indeed met them. All in all, I think I had to go through around 5 layers of security, of various types. No, I'm not joking.

Anyway, I got to the meeting room on the first floor and realized I had the edited source code with me in Opera (I had edited it to see whether the solution works). To show them the problem, I needed to refresh the page so that the original source code was available, and change it once again in front of them to show how to fix it. However, wi-fi wasn't available, and no ethernet cord was there in the meeting room as well. So they did the next best thing.

They printed out the source code of the pages in question and gave it to me. So now I have their site source code on a bunch of paper, and a pen which they graciously offered me, and had to explain what was on wrong in their own source code and how to fix it by marking it with pen and paper. Great!

Finally I did that, and I was glad that they finally got the solution. They were quite pleased to know that Opera pays so much attention to site compatibility and that we have a dedicated team for it. A few days later I got the news that they had fixed the issue, and the site no longer has the code which blocks opera.

The lengths to go to, to get a site fixed!