Got tired enough of the illogical BBC practice of allowing BBCi URLs to be given out on the air sans 'www' at the start — despite this practice being absolutely verboten when URLs are printed on screen — to complain to them. Why? Because watch what happens when you try these URLs:
- www.bbc.co.uk/radio1 — oh look, the Radio 1 homepage
- bbc.co.uk/radio1 — oh look, the top level, nothing-to-do-with-Radio-1 homepage ...
So sent this somewhere within the BBCi dungeons hierarchy:
Why is it that announcers and presenters are allowed to say "bee bee see dot co dot yoo kay slash something or other", but when I actually enter bbc.co.uk/whatever into my browser, I am unceremoniously dumped back to the BBCi homepage? How trivial would it be for your servers to redirect bbc.co.uk/whatever to www.bbc.co.uk/whatever, and save the presenters looking or sounding unprofessional in that they don't know the right web address for their programme?! Please consider changing this currently unfriendly and frankly illogical behaviour of the otherwise excellent BBCi service.
Hopefully I'll come off more as "Irritated of Central Scotland" and less of "I'm a Web Geek, Please Ignore Me" :)
updated 2003-08-21: someone from the BBC has responded! Read the comments for more ...
updated 2003-09-13: the subject has been raised at a BBC Online Operations meeting to be investigated further!
updated 2004-04-19: Une grande victoire!
updated 2004-05-07: The rebrand occurs! The BBC website is no longer BBCi, but bbc.co.uk!
53 comments
Comment pages: 1 2
blahbalh · 15 May, 2004 at 00:43
er..no
you're kidding yourself if you think that the marketing people at the BBC(i/co.uk) ever look at the Web, never mind your site
kudos to your interesting (and entirely sensible) campaign, but here's the real deal
1) (2 years ago) idiots in marketing can't get their head around the fact that the Net and interactive teevee are different
2) idiots think the best way to promote two separate platforms is to merge them into one (like telling people to tune to 97-99FM to watch BBC One)
3) BBCi introduced over everyone's objections
4) 2 years on, the forces of the sensible triumph (due to lots of things, of which, believe me, this site isnt one, can anyone say 'upcoming Top40'?)
5) as a result of this 'rebranding', work is done on the way that the bbc balances its dns requests
6) bingo - finally bbc.co.uk/foo works
good stuff though - are you the same neuro that work(s/ed) on smoothie?
neuro · 15 May, 2004 at 13:14
I didn't suggest that anyone in Marketing looked at this page - I did suggest that other people read this page, had it raised internally, and it was taken from there.
And yes, I'm the same neuro - http://smoothwall.org/~neuro/ - who works on smoothie :)
Bix · 29 March, 2011 at 23:24
THAT IS AWESOME!