Comment by mrtksn

Comment by mrtksn 3 days ago

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That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no.

It actually makes sense to have a paid service that makes this abomination less painful. Though they work with VFS Global for collecting the applications and relevant documents, the VFS Global itself is an abomination and doesn't help with the handling of the form filling anyway.

Recently EU streamlined the Schengen visa application process for Turkish citizens as those "visa agencies" that are the official agencies and the only way to apply for a visa for many countries don't actually help with anything and are scamming people by selling the "good hours" for the visa appointment on the black market. An agency was dropped for this and the scams by agencies were listed among the reasons to streamline the application process.

Both with US and EU people are losing scholarships etc. due to outrageous wait times that are sometimes are years ahead or there's an issue with the systems handling the applications.

I guess there must be an opportunity there to fix all this together with smaller stuff like handling transliteration and character encodings, I wonder if some of those scam site are not scams and actually help with it. An AI agent can be useful here.

gmueckl 3 days ago

I had to deal with the DS-160 multiple times over the year. I don't think you give justice to how bad this website really is. I have started to notice that these "timeouts" are very random. At the worst times, the session "times out" immediately after login.

These random logouts happens more frequently during certain times of the day and seems to follow a semi-predictable pattern. It is almost certainly tied to system load in some way.

Also, the site's HTML and JavaScript are bloated beyond hope for what should be a fairly simple set of web forms. And itnhas been thisnway since at least 2018 with exactly zero improvements.

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  • qingcharles 3 days ago

    One thing a developer sat in DC or SV with a 5G iPhone 16 doesn't realize too, is that if you are visiting these web sites with a phone plan that has a tiny monthly data allowance then this bloat can blow out an entire month in one sitting.

    I worked with people on parole that were given free phones to use for job applications, finding their way around etc, and they would only get 3GB data a month. Some of the sites they visited were dropping 250MB of payload on the home page. You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.

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    • Dylan16807 3 days ago

      > You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.

      Sure, I'll do my best to try it. I'll approximate the throttle by limiting chrome to 128kbps, 500ms delay, and 5% packet loss for fun.

      With a fresh incognito session, google responds to "here to 4th street" in 10 seconds, and when I click to open maps it needs just under two minutes to load. Then I can click on the transit option and it needs another 10 seconds to update.

      Not too bad for a cold cache. If I do it again with a hot cache it only takes 20 seconds to go through the whole process. And I expect the app to be similar to the hot cache situation. Even with 64kbps I'd expect reasonable results. Do any cell providers throttle worse than that?

      I agree with your argument about bloat in general, but google in particular has a lot of good engineering resources and tries to work well on bad connections.

      Also I would be in favor of some spectrum licensing rules that say you can't throttle below 1Mbps...

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      • qingcharles 2 days ago

        The paper stats on 2G would make it seem like it should work in theory, especially if it's using EDGE or something, but it just consistently fails in the field. You'll get partial renders and then it will jam up. It's super, super frustrating to use. Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something and that just cancels all the async downloads and restarts them.

        There are probably a host of other telemetry things going on in your standard $20 Android handset in the background too, eating up all that bandwidth and causing all sorts of bottlenecks.

        Agree it would be really nice to have some sane minimum speed.

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        • Dylan16807 2 days ago

          Well it's not ever going to be actual 2G. It's a throttle. I'm not sure how much worse it could get when you have a reasonably solid signal, but I guess nothing stops network engineers from doing something awful.

          > Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something

          At a certain point it's the user's fault. And once it gets to the point where you can swipe around, the tile loading should be pretty visible.

          And to add more emphasis to the app being usable, I can get driving directions fully offline, then click bus and now it needs one tiny server request to tell me.

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    • [removed] 3 days ago
      [deleted]
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rwmj 3 days ago

You might be making the assumption that the US wants to make the process easier.

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  • throw10920 3 days ago

    Not to defend the US immigration system, but my experience is that this user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites - including those that nominally want to serve you, those that are at the state level instead of the federal level (such as the DMV sites), and those that are even internal for use by government employees only.

    It's bad enough that in some cases I believe the designers should be threatened with legal penalties.

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    • PaulHoule 3 days ago

      That e-filing web site for taxes has never worked for my son because he can’t complete the id.me process, it might be as simple as you are an unperson if you use an android phone or maybe because he’s just started in the workforce he does not have a long history of tax filing and credit history to match up with.

      Two years in a row we’ve been able to fill out a 1040 and the NY state equivalent and make a paper submission in less time than it takes to reach an operator on hold.

      These identity verification services look like a scam to me. LinkedIn incessantly hassles me to verify with CLEAR and it always fails without a clear error message, either “it just doesn’t work” or my hair has grown too much since I got my driver’s license or it is making me take my glasses off and comparing to a driver’s license photo where I am wearing glasses.

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      • jofla_net 3 days ago

        >These identity verification services look like a scam to me.

        Even if their intent is to run an 'honest' business, the method of bouncing a user around to god knows how many domains during the process becomes effectively indistinguishable from a compromised service, and the alternative of having each site host their own id verification system screams, HACK US. I can see users becoming increasingly accustomed to getting out their cards several times during a sign-up and not having the foggiest idea of where their information went to.

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      • smithkl42 3 days ago

        The id.me process is absolutely horrific.

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        • IT4MD 3 days ago

          I'm not sure the word horrific is up to carrying the weight of just how bad id.me is. Still, a great effort.

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    • Sohcahtoa82 3 days ago

      > user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites

      I discovered this when it was late at night and I was procrastinating going to bed and I was curious what my estimated Social Security benefit would be at retirement so I tried to log into mySSA and it said the website is closed from like 11 PM to 5 AM or something like that.

      I couldn't believe it. I could understand a weekly several-hour maintenance/batch processing window, but DAILY?

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    • crote 2 days ago

      It starts to make a lot more sense when you realise there is a huge group in the US actively trying to make the government fail. It's pretty hard to make a good and user-friendly website when every few years some high-level people try to kneecap you.

      These aren't unsolvable problems. The UK, for example, had invested a lot of time and effort into making their websites user-friendly. In most countries filing taxes online is something you can do during your lunch break - without paying the Turbotax maffia. Driver's license? You can order that online, and make an appointment for a 15-minute window to pick it up.

      If interacting with the government is painful, it is almost always because someone benefits from it being painful.

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    • xenadu02 3 days ago

      Gaming of the procurement system. The websites are all written by big consulting outfits. Not to mention the disaster that is big corporate IT projects combined with government rules.

      Obama had the Digital Service (that Trump shut down) which paid higher salaries. Those folks were sharp and everything they touched was actually decent.

      As I noted this is not unique to government. Large corporate projects at the Fortune 500 are often the same sort of consultant-driven crap.

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      • anticensor 3 days ago

        Digital Service didn't shut down, it just temporarily got retasked to DOGE.

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        • dragonwriter 3 days ago

          It wasn't temporarily retasked, it was reorganized and permanently repurposed and renamed the US DOGE Service, and then within that reorganized service, a subordinate temporary organization was created called the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization that was scheduled to sunset not later than July 4, 2026. (All but 65 of USDS's pre-reorg employees were also fired as part of the reorg, and 21 of those remaining 65 employees did a mass resignation.)

          If you visit their website, you will notice that except for historical documents, there is no full name branding at all; mostly only the logo and the occasional "USDS", when prior to the reorg (as can be seen on the Wayback machine) the original full name was prominent.

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    • Our_Benefactors 3 days ago

      This. The website for buying treasury products is straight out of the year 2002. The login is so bad I would never consider buying them there - the service fee charged by brokerages is absolutely worth it in this case.

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      • ryandrake 3 days ago

        Which brokerages charge fees for purchasing US Treasuries? Schwab definitely doesn't.

        Really the only reason you need TreasuryDirect is for buying Series I bonds (and maybe a few other niche Treasury products), which are not available through brokerages.

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        • aianus 3 days ago

          Schwab folds their fees into their bid/ask spread, they're not doing it for free.

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      • PaulHoule 3 days ago

        Back when interest rates peaked around that period I bought a huge number of I bonds which were a great investment —- got fired by my broker because I interrupted a sales presentation with “why don’t I just buy I bonds?”

        Back then I thought Treasury Direct was great.

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      • teiferer 3 days ago

        Makes it obvious which lobby has a hand in this, doesn't it?

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  • IT4MD 3 days ago

    That would be an abysmally poor assumption currently.

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  • dfxm12 3 days ago

    I'd invoke Hanlon's razor, but in this case, it's certainly both malice and stupidity...

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  • qingcharles 3 days ago

    The web front ends are awful, but the back ends are even worse. The backlogs for some of these applications is insane. I was at a US embassy one time and got talking to a girl who had just had her application approved after an 18 year wait.

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    • LorenPechtel 3 days ago

      18 year wait for approval or 18 year wait for family sponsored immigrant visa? Because from some countries those do have 18 year backlogs.

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  • cromka 3 days ago

    You use the same system for Business visas. Hard to imagine US wouldn’t want those as easy as possible.

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    • jazzypants 3 days ago

      You don't have a good enough imagination for how stupid our current leadership really is.

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      • more_corn 3 days ago

        I guarantee the visa system was created before the current administration.

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      • snapetom 3 days ago

        I don’t know if you’re US-based or not but in the US, government work has the stigma of attracting the bottom of the barrel. It is nearly impossible to get fired for performance reasons. Combine low pay and high job security, and you’re not going to attract the most innovative, motivated, or competent people.

        Early in my career, I was warned that if I took a job with the state of California, I’d be stuck there for my whole career. I’d be unhirable in the private sector.

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      • xp84 3 days ago

        During 8 years of Obama and 4 years of Biden, none of this was different or better. Perhaps this isn't a partisan political issue.

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        • schlauerfox 3 days ago

          From 2014 until it was, in effect, obliterated by DOGE actions this year there was the "United States Digital Service", a crack team of programmers, a sort of skunkworks who worked to improve U.S. government websites of departments that wanted the help. So it seems to be partisan to want good websites, but there are countless people involved in politics with many agendas.

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    • nkoren 3 days ago

      Hard to imagine that the US wouldn't be as paranoid, self-sabotaging, and bureaucratically inept as possible? </sarcasm>

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    • conductr 3 days ago

      As a US citizen, I feel it’s opposite. Hard to imagine they’d want anything related to visas to be easy.

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    • jimz 3 days ago

      [flagged]

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      • cogogo 3 days ago

        My wife, a green card holder, applied for citizenship in April and was naturalized yesterday (from an EU country). Not that I don’t believe it could be true but where are you getting the 3-4yr timeline? If that’s accurate she/we may have dodged a massive bullet.

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      • giantg2 3 days ago

        I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.

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  • swat535 3 days ago

    If there is any conclusion to be drawn here, it is that the United States doesn't want foreigners in their land (for tourism or otherwise).

    I'm not sure I see the upside of moving to a nation knowing that its citizens actively despise my existence.

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AnotherGoodName 3 days ago

The VISA appointment scheduling site rate limits to a ridiculous degree these days. As in refresh your page within 10seconds and get a 429 error.

That's probably because of the fact that the appointments are near impossible to get, they only allow booking a few months out and it's always completely booked. So everyone was refreshing (or if clever botting) to get an appointment slot.

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karel-3d 3 days ago

As I wrote elsewhere; they subcontract the bot protection to F5, an external company that I see for some reason a lot on old/horrible banking websites.

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  • DaSHacka 3 days ago

    F5 is huge in enterprise and academia for firewall/VPN/load-balancer services

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svnee 3 days ago

Hey, this is actually something I have a keen interest in as I'm fighting my government (as an MP) to drop those scammers where possible. Do you have any media links to send me about them selling the "good hours" on the black market?

Even if the US has a horrible visa system – as I can attest, despite only having to do it every 5 years – the EU countries could benefit from attracting talent by being more welcoming. So that is part of my mission as an MP and tech-entrepreneur. Any help and pointers is welcome.

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  • mrtksn 3 days ago

    Hi, about the Schengen visa situation in Turkey you can find articles like these that describe how the appointments are on the black market(In Turkish but I'm sure AI will do good job translating):

    https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cz5r2l43kn2o

    https://medyascope.tv/2024/01/22/vize-sorunu-kontrolden-cikt...

    On the social media the anecdotes differ but some say they were able to get the visa appointments bots, others say it was agency personel selling it to them under the table. Maybe its really the agency personel, or maybe it's people running bots to snap appointments and sell those pretending to be from the agency - can't know for sure but there are multiple services where people purchase appointments unofficially.

    In general the news situation in Turkey isn't very good as with the law enforcement but as you can see even BBC took notice.

    Generally speaking, these visa agencies are very unfriendly and unreachable. They seem to just collect the money, provide no personalized help at all. My GF had some questions about her US visa application, we were not able to reach VFS Global. The phone numbers provided don't work, it's not even like taking long to speak with a human, the phone just gives you calling error.

    She previously used the same company for her Schengen visa for a company event in Paris, of course unreachable again and no appointments available. Because she works at a French corporation, she was able to ask a high ranking French person in the company who has a contact with the French embassy and they arranged the appointment shortly.

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sharno 3 days ago

Whenever I'm filling a long form on an official website, I feel like I'm racing against an invisible clock because of this session time out thing that happened to me countless times.

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dansimco 3 days ago

I had this problem too last year. I found, at the time, it was the website was poorly managing the session in some browsers causing the timeout countdown to not be reset on activity. I had to find a windows computer and use microsoft edge I think (maybe it was chrome). But no browser on my mac would not have that issue.

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dent9 3 days ago

> In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no.

No clue if this specific instance if scam but such scams have indeed been done before

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go

> According to Ablakwa, a locally recruited staff member and "collaborators" were allegedly involved in a "fraudulent" scheme whereby they extracted money from visa and passport applicants.

> It is alleged that the scheme consisted of creating an unauthorised link on the embassy's website to redirect visa and passport applicants to a private firm where they were "charged extra for multiple services" without the knowledge of the foreign ministry.

> Ablakwa added that the staff member "kept the entire proceeds" in their private account, and that the scheme had been going on for five years.

> Applicants seeking visas were charged unapproved fees ranging from almost $30 (£22) to $60 by the private firm.

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paganel 3 days ago

The hard truth of it all is that both the US and (partially) the EU don’t want to make this easier because seeing as wanting “outside” people is now a political liability. You may want to adjust your expectations around that.

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  • mrtksn 3 days ago

    Turkish tourist are desired, Turks love spending money on restaurants and activities especially since the prices in Turkey have become more expensive than most of the EU. Greeks even introduced special non-Schengen on-arrival visa valid on the Greek islands especially for the Turks. Besides that, EU has "green passport" exception for the Turkish nationals, where they can travel visa-free on this kind of passport that is provided to individuals that meet certain criteria and millions of such passports were issued.

    The rejection rates are also not bad and EU has a "return agreement" with Turkey, which is designed to keep the middle eastern refugees in Turkey(essentially, if you come from Turkey EU can send you back to Turkey right away ).

    Crime rates for Turks show up among the lowest ones, unlike others from the region. So I don't think that EU is trying to reduce visas for Turks.

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    • rat9988 3 days ago

      You are looking at it from Turkish perspective unfortunately.

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      • mrtksn 3 days ago

        I am EU citizen, I happen to know the Turkish perspective only because spent some years in Turkey and in fact it is the Turkish perspective that that EU doesn't want them and intentionally makes things harder but the moment you look at what's actually going on you see that this is not the case, just a Turkish fantasy about the "evil West and snobby Europeans". Considering that last year 50K Turks applied for asylum in EU and another 100K overstayed their visa, IMHO EU can be considered pretty generous actually with only 15% rejection rate since Turkey is the 2nd country with most applications after China.

        https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/visa-applications-rea...

        https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

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    • lazide 3 days ago

      The US gov’t has been actively targeting CANADA, one of the countries historically closest trading partners and allies.

      Maybe in the EU it’s all good, but expect a lot of turbulence in the US.

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  • eviks 3 days ago

    That doesn't explain the same poor operational quality before it became a liability

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  • [removed] 3 days ago
    [deleted]
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supportengineer 3 days ago

>> the system just kick her out

The "waterfall model" is a toxic way of thinking that pervades corporate management. Simplistic minds can't fathom any states other than "done" or "not done". Corporations are determined to crush the human soul. That is why it's not a progressive series of forms, saving your progress all along.

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  • smithkl42 3 days ago

    More-or-less agreed about the waterfall model, but you can't blame horrific US government website performance on "corporations" or "corporate management". This is precisely the sort of thing that would get you fired in any real-world corporation that wants to survive, and it's precisely the fact that you can't get fired by the federal government that allows this sort of thing to continue.

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