The school I attend, UVSC (Utah Valley State College) recently installed a new management system for students to login to and register for classes, pay tuition, check email, etc. It sucks. Now, the last one wasn’t great to start with, but I’ve had nothing but problems with the new one. While the last one wasn’t great, it at least worked.

But that’s not the point of this wtf?!. It’s actually the help request form used if you run into issues with the system - in my case, it won’t log me in because it decided my account should be disabled “for inactivity”. Sorry guys, but I don’t care about checking my tuition balance on a weekly basis.

First, the form warns you that “This form will only work if you have an Email client installed on the computer you are submitting this request from.” That was the first clue that I had a potential wtf?! on my hands.

But the true wtf?! shines through when you click “Submit”, and your mail client opens with all details of the form pasted into a new message for you to send. Viewing the source of the page, you can see that the extent of the ‘programming’ that went into this form was setting the action to be a mailto: link. Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of using a contact form if you just redirect the info back into a mail client? What if I don’t have one installed? Am I SOL?

What scares me about this is this: Are the geniuses behind this form the ones I’m supposed to rely on for keeping my information secure and making sure my tuition payments get made?

If you want to view this beast in the wild: https://uvlinx.uvsc.edu/lumlogin/helprequest.htm