Technical Issues with Kiva.org Website

[Guest]

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[alan]

Here's a weird one, first pointed out to me by an LLL team member. I have sent the following bug report to contactus.

When sorting by Expiring Soon, on page 8 there is a loan listing for the "Los Tunales Group" (id 166257). The "more >>" link does not lead to the loan description, but rather to a page on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article is linked from the loan description, but obviously ought not to be linked from the loan list page. This occurs with Internet Explorer 6 and 7, but not with Safari or Firefox.

[YowieFreak]

Here's a weird one, first pointed out to me by an LLL team member. I have sent the following bug report to contactus.

It occurs because the limit for the number of characters of the description being shown on the loan listing pages falls right in the middle of the link within the description:

Code:

            <i>This Communal Bank is named for the
prickly pear cacti that grow in the
districts of San Bartolomé and
Tornameza.  From this area comes <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochi
neal"... <a href="app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=166257&_tpos=4&_tpg=8"> more >></a></i>

So everything gets confused because of the "<a ..." tag not being completed before Kiva starts inserting a new "<a ...> ... < /a >" tag.

[alan]

Curious. So IE has trouble rendering it as intended, but Firefox and Safari manage to sort it out. 

[YowieFreak]

Curious. So IE has trouble rendering it as intended, but Firefox and Safari manage to sort it out. 

IE probably ignores anything after it finds an illegal character (the "<") inside the "<a ... >" construct and just processes the good stuff.

Meanwhile, Firefox and Safari (being a bit backward ) appear to scan ahead to find a closing ">" for the construct, then work backward to find the previous "<".  Or maybe they work forwards but ignore the "... <a " portion after the end of the first href, then decide that the second href overrides the first href.  Who knows.     But I wouldn't say that they "manage to sort it out" - just that they end up with the answer that we, as regular users of this page, expect in this particular case - but probably from luck rather than through design.

Anyway, its a classic garbage (which invalidly constructed html code is) in, garbage out situation.

[alan]

But I wouldn't say that they "manage to sort it out" - just that they end up with the answer that we, as regular users of this page, expect in this particular case - but probably from luck rather than through design.

Yes, quite right. Just dumb luck that it works out in this case for those of us who use Safari or Firefox. I suppose the fix from Kiva's side would be to strip any HTML from the quoted extract in the loan list, rather than depending on the unpredictable behaviour of the various browsers.

[cjp1973]

Website Maintenance this Thursday

We're taking the Kiva website down for infrastructure maintenance this Thursday at 5pm PST. We expect the outage to be brief but may take up to four hours. Thanks for your patience!

So that would be January 28th!

[wthepoo]

It seems I haven't received a loan confirmation e-mail for my last two loans (made about an hour ago - maybe I am just too impatient?).

Best wishes,
Wolfgang.

[AccountAbility]

In its current iteration, the Kiva website no longer has a link at the bottom of each page to the list of Field Partners.  This link has been displaced by a link to Developers and maybe Jobs and Volunteers.  (I don't remember all that was there before.)

Dan

[wthepoo]

Clicking on the "Kiva" logo or the "Home" link on any Kiva page takes me to http://partners.kiva.org instead of http://www.kiva.org -
there, I am asked for a login/password for the staff-/MFI-part of the site...

Best wishes,
Wolfgang.

EDIT: Sorry, hadn't looked closely enough. I was originally following a link to a loan page from an e-mail sent to me by Kiva (http://partners.kiva.org/lend/176695?_te=de) - and from there, all links apart from the "Home" and "Kiva" links work fine (linking to freely accessible mirror pages on http://partners.kiva.org, it appears) so that I didn't notice I was wrong...

[iampaul]

The "More Loans from this Partner" link on an entrepreneur's page seems to be unable to cope well if there aren't enough fundraising loans available for that particular MFI. Looking at loans for Tujijenge Tanzania Ltd this morning, it included alternate choices for Afghanistan and Nigeria in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. Tests with other pages with limited offerings such as a Nepalese entrepreneur had similar results - showing, for example, Indonesia and Lebanon.