Monday, 22 November 2010

iBurst woe's and solution

I recently ran out of prepaid iBurst again (why I use prepaid iBurst is a whole other story).. and to my surprise, the normal recharge page had an error. I suspect that iBurst wasn't letting me see the recharge page cos I didn't have Internet left to see the page!

An oversight! Pretty much, what one landed up with, was an infinite loop of redirects, one which safari and other browsers (yes, I tried them all) intervened and showed a message like this:

It's hilarious if you think of what is possibly happening: "go somewhere... you have no internet, so go to this page... can't, you have no internet so go to this page.. can't, you have no internet so go to this page" x 5 million.

So, what to do, right? Well, fortunately, the URL of the frame of the recharge window was in my browser history... but, that didn't give me the navigation to recharge, only my account overview showing me zero balance. Then I took a guess, which paid off, I changed the content.php to index.php, and voila, the whole page appeared! I was now free to recharge my internet. For those of you who don't have it in your history, the page is: https://customer.prepaid.ibcore.net/index.php?bw_depleted=1

Now if you don't have Internet, you're probably not reading this now, so I'd encourage you to bookmark that link for when you DO run out on iBurst, in case they haven't fixed this.

Not exactly hacking, but not exactly what your average user can be expected to figure out. Nice one iBurst. You guys are all as bad as each other. I'm soon hoping to be hooking up with ADSL, and jumping into the uncapped world! Yea, that's right, it'll be like 1999 in America, here, in South Africa, today. once.