Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: I absolutely HATE the FAFSA website

This is topic I absolutely HATE the FAFSA website in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Chris Slycord (Member # 4239) on 01-22-2010, 04:44 AM:

Don't want this to be political (since it is with the government's financial aid webpage thingy) but the stupidity of their use of technology is astounding.

I got an email that I needed to update my form for the 2010-2011 school year. So I visit the webpage and try to fill it out. Then I find that you can only fill out the thing if you've used a browser/OS combination that they've certified.

Since I'm running Windows 7 and they haven't certified anything in that OS, it didn't work. So I turn on my netbook which has XP and try using both firefox and IE, only to realize that they only certified XP with IE6 (for those who never update?) and IE7 (for those who update rarely). And I noticed that my version of IE was certified (if I'd been running Vista). Oh and firefox failed because they certified it in XP, but only an old version as well (for those who don't update).

Then when I sent a tech support complaint saying that they need to certify at least something using win7, all I got back was a copy of the same certification list that I knew about already. Ugh. Guess I'll uninstall IE8 from the netbook which'll drop it to version 6 just to fill this thing out since I need the loan for school.

edit: nm, it seems the "certification" was just a warning although they give a big nefarious warning as if using others will cause your soul to be eaten and I was too tired to see that it was merely a warning.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 01-22-2010, 09:30 AM:

Just get the user agent add-on for Firefox and tell your browser to lie.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

I do that sort of thing all the time. Unless they use IP fingerprinting (analyze your packets) they can't tell the difference. Any webmaster who would specify such old browser technology would not know how to use IP fingerprinting anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP_stack_fingerprinting

Posted by Chris Slycord (Member # 4239) on 01-22-2010, 01:12 PM:

Thanks. It was way too late for me to think of that.