(Long) For your enjoyment, legacy PHP web site hell [modified]
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I submitted this to The Daily WTF and they didn't use it, so here we go. (PS: I saw it's now in TDWTF Forums. Zecc, I signed up for the forums over a week ago now but it requires admin approval before you can post. Admin appears to be away because I never got approved. I also submitted again to ask them to approve my account so I could use the forums and I got no response. It's not that I just "couldn't be bothered", the whole thing has left me slightly miffed.) -- A company I work with is replacing a mainframe application with a trendy new version, but it's not complete yet. The old software still published customer data to a website once an hour, and this responsibility had to be handed off to the new system, but "in the old format", until a proper project could be contracted out to make a new website. It sounded like a nightmare. There was only a production system to work with, all the data had to be extracted in a few CSV formats (incremental and full updates) and transferred over FTP. I was told there was no access to the source code, nobody knew how it worked aside from it being in production for nearly a decade, and the only way to test it would be to click a button that could start a manual import process, quickly check a few screens, and revert the data again with a forced export from the legacy system before anyone could notice anything wrong. I took it on, for fun. I started by spending days creating a CSV extract from data in the new system based on the column names that had been provided from the legacy system. Then I compared the data to a previous CSV and found that the old system ignored/munged a whole bunch of those columns and that I had to start from scratch and build a new "purposefully broken extract", just in case the parser on the web-site end (a complete black box at the time) would choke on logically valid data. The one good thing was that the website was supposed to email us with a detailed explanation or where and why any data import failed. And finally, late one night, we tested it by FTP'd the new data over and clicking the manual import button. And nothing happened. Not even the email. "It's a disaster!" The format of my data export was assumed incorrect and so bad that the web site couldn't even parse it, so it was thrown back at me. I went over it column by column and could not find any problems. I explained as such, and another developer sent off a complaint to the web hosting company asking if they had messed something up (Why them? "Because it used to work