No foreigners please, we’re the Daily Express!
It is amazing how sometimes the mistakes we make in our web applications reveal a little bit about the things we don’t care to notice as as organisation.
Take, for example, the registration process on the Daily Express website, which you need to go through to sign up for MyEXPRESS in order to comment.
When you register, you get to pick from a lovely long detailed list of locations in the UK.
What you can’t do, however, is choose to be from anywhere other than the UK. The drop-down menu to choose a country isn’t populated. If they ever look at their sign-up metrics, nobody seems to have thought that a lack of overseas registrations indicated there was a problem.
Good old Daily Express, eh? So xenophobic, you can’t even register as a user from outside the UK...
I would say that "mistake" also applies to an awful lot of US websites where my address has to include a US state.
I wonder what the "international population" of Alabama is - as it is the first option in the drop-down menu on most web forms, so I end up just selecting that as a default fake state.
(Just don't get me started on UK websites that require a state/county for people living in London!)
Gotta love the fact that the places are arranged by county too. County! How quaint! They're even using the historic ceremonial counties - Berkshire was split up into unitary authorities long ago.
...and Milton Keynes is in Buckinghamshire, not Bedfordshire - and, as far as I know, always has been!