I hate Lotus Notes

I have already complained about the bad error messages that Lotus Notes keep showing. “Attempt to execute nested form events.” occurs every now and then. To me this says nothing at all. It makes no sense. What form? Why is it nested? Who’s trying to execute it?

I guess the developer responsible for that error message was having a rough time; maybe something similar as what Britney Spears is going through now?

Well anyway, this must be an all time low when it comes to meaningless error messages…

This is also a message I see way to often: “Network operation did not complete in a reasonable amount of time; please retry”.

It makes me wonder; what is a reasonable amount of time? The message usually appears after two to three minutes which as far, far away from a reasonable amount of time. I would say that ten seconds is the limit when waiting for the inbox to be refreshed.

Instead you have to wait and wait, just to get an error message. I mean, sometimes you actually get to see the content of your inbox. That little (one in a million?) piece of hope makes you wait, and wait.

You bastards! You vicious, heartless bastards! Oh… it makes me mad… mad!

About three weeks ago I noticed that I didn’t receive all emails sent to me. Since I couldn’t find anything wrong with my Lotus Notes client (well, at least nothing that would cause this behavior), I realized that I had to call the Lotus Notes support.

After about three weeks of problems they finally managed to get my emails working properly again. All missing emails started to show up in my inbox and I found one especially interesting from the support team:

“Notice,

Since your inbox is too big we have disabled your email account. You will not receive any emails until you have cleaned your inbox, you are allowed to have 300 MB and you currently have more than 3 GB

Thanks

Support team”

I mean… come on! You don’t email someone to tell him that he won’t receive emails! That would be like… like… I don’t know. But it’s really, really stupid. For real.

Or was it error friendly? One thing that really makes you love to hate Lotus Notes is all the mystic error messages. This is one that I see every now and then: “Attempt to execute nested form events.” which makes a lot of sense to the every day user… I mean, we are talking about nested form events here, people!

Did the developer think that it would make any sense at all?
Well, at least I know what to do when I see it; turn off the computer, leave the office and head for the closest bar.

Just after the launch of I hate Lotus Notes a friend of mine pointed out the fact that similar sites already exists. I’m not surprised, au contraire! I would have been surprised if other sites didn’t exist. Lotus Notes seems to bring out the worst of everyone, and when you are mad enough you want to do something about it!

My hope is that we all join forces, under the flag of I hate Lotus Notes off course, and take control over the world!

We are not alone in our quest:

Interface hall of shame, http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/lotus.htm

But I won’t tell you what it is. Just like a child, this is what Lotus Notes tells me every time I start the software.

In Notes 6.5 there is a “Welcome start page” with the bizarre text “This is the protected text area of the form.”.  Now, why would you say something like that? Is it because they want me to try to hack the protected area, or should I be impressed that a protected area exists? I have no idea, but every time I see the text it drives me mad!