5 indicators that an article is not worth reading

You've seen them often enough. They lure you in with a promise of fulfilling your heart's desire, empowering you and transforming your management/IT/tap-dancing skills. Follow this simple guide and save hours of frustration. You can avoid wasting your life exposing yourself to someone's Google adword farm. Watch for these tell-tale signs....

A complex discussion is decomposed into a small number of bullet of bullet points (5 seems particularly popular). The prose is presented as rambling text, usually 2-3 screenfuls when a bullet point layout would have taken a fraction of the space and less of your time.

The N points only address a subset of problem context from a unilateral viewpoint

The article spends more time discussing a specific solution than the problem
or even how the solution addresses the problem. It certainly never, ever compares alternative approaches.

Buzzwords - "Successful", "Must Read", "master"

It never links to authoritative sources.

It's just getting to the point where you might learn something you didn't already know when

Talktalk support - laughable.

I've just wasted nearly an hour of my life trying to get Talktalk to fix their servers.

Like a growing number of providers, they ignore the rules about DNS. Try to access a page which doesn't exist in a browser and you get a redirect to an error page instead of a NXDOMAIN.

There is some quite clever stuff going on here, BUT MAKING THAT REDIRECT CACHEABLE IS NOT ONE OF THEM. 

Particularly when your DNS forwarders are on the blink!

They don't even have the sense to return a 404 code!
Could they do any worse? Actually, yes, they could! The frame handling is just silly.

colin@animal ~ $ curl -i 'http://kshgauyuegvuaFRA.com/none.html'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2020 19:46:59 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
Expires: Thu, 20 Feb 2020 19:56:59 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=600
X-Frame-Options: DENY

SWMBO thought we should report this to their support. Unfortunately the online chat people had all gone home early.



Which mean dealing with IVR-of-pain before eventually speaking to some poor helpdesk person in India who had trouble spelling DNS. They assured me that there was "nothing wrong with my line" despite me trying to tell them I knew that - the problem was with their DNS server and their web server.

They hung up on me.