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669 points danso | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.635s | source
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coffeefirst ◴[] No.23261776[source]
"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. Do they really not have anyone who knows how to get stuff done?

1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem.

2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen this coming.

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xienyc ◴[] No.23262428[source]
>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer.

That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how to take pictures as JPEGs.

I agree with the people blaming the board for not having a standard image input field that lets the OS know when to convert images to JPEG but that is their only fault and I wouldn't have thought of that as a bug deal if not for this issue. While I'm all for open source media formats replacing what we have, HEIC certainly isn't big enough to be considered as among standard input options. Also, isn't Apple themselves infamous for not supporting certain formats throughout their devices?

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pwthornton ◴[] No.23262512[source]
If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format.

Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format.

Good product design is owning your users' success. It is not sending people workaround emails.

The bare minimum would have to be to do a warning before every single AP test about this and giving students a few minutes to change their default image format. Sending a tweet (!!!) out does not count as doing any work.

This is a failure. An abysmal failure.

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lisper ◴[] No.23263816[source]
> If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this

At the very least, a message that appeared at the time that one attempted to upload the image with instructions on how to fix the problem on the spot. How hard could that have possibly been?

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1. munk-a ◴[] No.23264021[source]
Quite hard? I mean shame on them for letting this bug through in the first place but I'd be pretty horrified if someone at CB tried to hot-fix this problem out.

This isn't a small agile organization, it's enormous and may not have any route to get a patch out in less than a week due to QA requirements. (That isn't to say such slow deployment processes are good, but they do exist and may be contractually required)

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2. lisper ◴[] No.23264124[source]
Who said anything about a hot fix? They knew about the problem well ahead of time.
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3. PascLeRasc ◴[] No.23264336[source]
Anything less than 2 fiscal quarters is a hot fix for these people.