Orkut Beta Scrapbook Ajax BUG

Posted on December 27, 2007 
Filed Under Reviews

imageOrkut in its initial days used to give several exceptions or errors now and then, which has really improved over the course of time. Being Orkut in beta version, few errors in a long lost while are quite acceptable. But shouldn’t Orkut be concentrating on making things more stable before adding more new features, provided that the new feature have improved user experience a lot.

Orkut uses Ajax very extensively even for places where it may be avoided, this is quite different from other Google services. For example when sending a scrap to someone on Orkut, first it is send using an Ajax request and then the page is reloaded. Its hard to make out the reason or purpose for this approach. But this makes sense entirely when replying to a scraps received by clicking the reply link which expands a form below the scrap and goes away after the scrap is send without reloading page.

Now a real dead end situation is when an exception or error takes place while processing an Ajax request. To surprise Orkut seems like not to be handling exceptions or errors which takes place while processing an Ajax request. User will keep pressing the post scrap button again and again as nothing happens but no message is shown, leaving the end user clue less of what happened.

This problem cannot be diagnosed unless special tools are used to study the Ajax requests and their response. After using a very popular tool used by web developers called Firebug for Firefox, failed Ajax requests can be seen very clearly.

orkut_exception_firebug_console
Ajax response on exception or error

 

On further investigating the issue, the response received was in HTML which looked like in the image above and the message contained was:

We did not understand your last request. Please go back and try again. You may also need to re-login, if this error persists.

This is exactly the response end user would see normally that is received in response to Ajax request due to some exception or an error.

After the scrapbook was reloaded this problem was solved.

PS: I have already reported this issue to Orkut with issue# 227669358

Comments

2 Responses to “Orkut Beta Scrapbook Ajax BUG”

  1. Antonio on May 7th, 2008 9:10 pm

    I think if orkut just tried remaining stable instead of adding on they would not be keeping up with the game. I think it would be more of a hindrance to them.

  2. Scrapbooks on June 19th, 2008 7:14 am

    Thanks for sharing the fix!

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