Every now and then, I use a web app and it tells me that this or that
field
is invalid. Generally it’s an email address that doesn’t accept a plus
before the @, or a phone number that doesn’t accept well formated
international phone numbers (starting with a plus, containing hyphens)
or
maybe it fails to deal with my name or last name which contain this
terrible
characters: and . Of course, the developed failed here.
Generally I try to have my validations be much better about it, but I’m
sure
that I’m not inmune to the issue of rejecting valid data. What concerns
me
is that, unlike exceptions, for which I get an email, I’ll never know
about
this issues unless a user tells me, and they rarely do.
So, I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if Rails automatically saved the
attributes of an object to the database when the validations fail? I
suppose
a gem could do it by monkey-patching validate or something like that and
I’m
also sure I’m not the first one to think of this.
Does anybody know if that gem already exists? If not, I’ll give it a
try.
What do you think about this feature? Does it sound useful?
So, I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if Rails automatically
saved the attributes of an object to the database when
the validations fail?
No, it wouldn’t. Do you really want to have billions of records in your
database from all the spam bots trying to log in?
Now, suppose you logged a billion failed logins per month in your log
file. What then? Are you going to send them a nice email telling them
exactly how to gain access to your site and spam it to death?
On Saturday, September 17, 2011 7:00:18 PM UTC+2, Ruby-Forum.com User
wrote:
So, I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if Rails automatically
saved the attributes of an object to the database when
the validations fail?
No, it wouldn’t. Do you really want to have billions of records in your
database from all the spam bots trying to log in?
I never did this of course, but in similar situations, filtering bots
wasn’t
that hard. The filter was not perfect, but you don’t want perfect, you
don’t
need to catch every time someone puts valid information and is marked as
invalid; you just need to get some of those, to improve the app.
If you don’t log or remove the entries for China and Russia and maybe
some
other countries, in my experience, you’ll get rid of most bots. Other
filters could be, for example, invalid emails without an @ I don’t care
about, but invalid ones with an @ I do care about.
You may want to have a captcha in your form anyway.
In most applications I built, the only public part is the
register/login.
Fine, I don’t log those. But the complex forms inside that my customers
use
constantly, I do want to know whether they are friendly or not.
I see the problem you point to, but I don’t think it’s a showstopper.
Does anybody know if that gem already exists? If not, I’ll give it a try.
Tripwire shows you the validation errors your users are experiencing,
giving you a new way to uncover UX issues in your app. …"
Seems pretty much what you asked for.
Indeed it does. I don’t get it why it’s a Heroku addon and not just a
simple
plain gem.
sure that I’m not inmune to the issue of rejecting valid data. What concerns
"… Have you ever filled out a form only to have it rejected because of
an
unexpected, overly-restrictive validation error? It’s frustrating and
annoying, and it probably happens to your users too.
Tripwire shows you the validation errors your users are experiencing,
giving
you a new way to uncover UX issues in your app. …"
Seems pretty much what you asked for.
Peter
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