What Is The Unhappy Path, Alex?
If you’re like me, you think you’re smarter than you are. If you’re really, really like me, you’ve taken the Jeopardy! online contestant search, a scheduled, timed little application that allows you to perform the equivalent of the old written test. If you’re not like me, though, you followed the unhappy path and could have missed out on the test.
Here’s the situation: The event is scheduled, say for January 28 at 8:00. You can begin logging in a half hour ahead of the event. Here’s the main page for it:
Now, if you click that Login/Launch Test button, it takes you to the login screen, jeopardyTest.php:
This is the happy path. This works.
Now, say you’re back on this screen again:
Now, suppose you’d registered a couple of weeks ago and need to get your password. You click a link to go to the Password Retrieval page, which looks like this:
Type in your e-mail address, click Submit, and wait for the password with your e-mail in clear text. Then, you click the Login/Launch Test button on the Password Retrieval page and….uh oh:
Suddenly, it’s sending you to index_static.php, which is reporting that you’re too early for the test. Man, I hope you’re smart enough to go back to the main page and log in from there. Perhaps the authors of the Jeopardy! Web site seek to reward people with instant password recall as well as instant trivia recall.
Regardless, you know what I’m going to say again, aren’t you? An automated link check isn’t going to cough this one up; it’s going to tell you, “Hey, I found a page! Yay, us!” It pays to have a person out there checking all the links, every time. It takes a couple of extra hours, but it will keep you from being embarrassed and possibly sued by thousands of people who took an unhappy path.
