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I also had problems getting the coupon to open or download on firefox. I didn’t care enough about it to try in safari or go to a winbox.

Dunno … my computer is blocked (by my employer — don’t worry, lunch break) from downloading most things, but I had no problem printing the coupon… there was no “downloads” dialog or anything … perhaps they’d changed it by then or since then? No wait times, either.

Campus IT asked people to not install the thingummy because it somehow won’t work with the Explorer we have installed in offices and labs. I have IE7, not going to play to their stupidity in FF or Chrome. Could have been brilliant marketing, but they turned it into fail.

All the popular coupon websites use some variant of that downloader; patrons at my public library are coming in all the time because they hear about these sweet websites and run right into the brick wall. It’s frustrating for them and for reference staff.

My Library IT guru said that the website you go to installs spyware along with the coupon thingummy (as sroy put it). We were told today that under no circumstances are we to even think about going to the website…

The firefox problem was probably not unique to you. I’ve run into other sites that do various sort of systems checks and work fine in firefox on windows, but assume that if you’re on a Mac, then you MUST be using safari, regardless of what your browser says, and sends you the safari version of everything. Which, of course, breaks on firefox.

I like chicken, so I gave it a try. For the first couple hours (refreshing periodically), I just kept getting the “sorry, too busy” error screen. Eventually I was prompted to install their printer software, which I did. But when I tried to print the coupons, it just spun and spun. I tried hitting it again, and got the “you already printed your coupons” error.

Fine - I actually didn’t expect it to work. But that’s me, and speaks to your point about expectations: if this didn’t work for a patron, it’s the library’s fault, not Oprah’s.

Also, I was surprised at how slick-looking the “too busy” error page was - it was as if they were planning on lots of problems. If you expect so much traffic that you think your site will crash, how about spending time bumping up the available bandwidth instead of developing a pretty “you’re out of luck because we suck” page.

But the bottom line is that I’m not going to try their new chicken - and isn’t getting me in the door the point? Their technology failed in that goal.

Every time a client asks us to do a coupon for them we tell them that the best thing to do is just expect some people to print a lot of them and deal with the end results.

Sounds like Yum Brands listened to their lawyers instead of people with an understanding of the medium.

I’m an IT Librarian at my library. I just heard about people requesting this from a colleague ten minutes ago. Our public PCs are heavily locked down here, so it’s not possible to install 3rd party software. Changes need to be carefully planned and executed in off-hours. Not what our public nor our public service staff want to hear. I’m used to this kind of thing. There’s always something people want to download and install.

Just for grins, I clicked the link from the Linux box. I got an unsupported browser screen which presumably means that it picked up my browser info and saw my O/S detail since all Firefox versions here are 3.0.10 only the operating systems vary.

It doesn’t speak Linux. That’s fine for me because I don’t speak fast food even when it is free or seemingly free since I got the very real impression it was wanting to install something and gather personal data.

My guess it that the real purpose behind the barcode and no photo copies isn’t so much about discouraging cheating but connecting barcode to download and building a database for email marketing and showing the effectiveness of the campaign.

So I wouldn’t be shocked if libraries where coupons were printed got a second round of PITA when the IT group has to clean up and clear out the marketing trail that comes with the coupon.

Holy crap, there are 5000 comments on oprah’s faq, most of which appear to be saying “it didn’t work”. The scale of that response not only shows just how big of a technical fiasco this was, but also reminds us that Oprah has powers we cannot even imagine.

AH! I’m so glad you wrote this- I had this issue all day today and was astonished that the coupon would require users to download something…

Now that I know Oprah was behind the flurry of people coming into the library JUST to print out this coupon, it all makes more sense. I thought maybe people were just really jonesing for some chicken.

In the olden days (the really, really olden days), people just tied up the reference telephones to get answers to radio contests. We would catch on after the third or fourth person the same trivia question. Never offered to split the prize either.

You can enable the coupon to be printed another four times by deleting its keys in the registry; there was a DMCA court case about this.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080725/0236381792.shtml is a good overview of the case.

(Also, the barcodes are identical on all copies of the same coupon, and the software isn’t spyware (it just manipulates these registry keys to restrict how many times you can print the coupon), so you can take the tinfoil hats off.)

Thanks for the heads up. Just had a patron asking about this here at my community college library. Happily I was pre-informed by your blog post. Thanks, Jessamyn!

I work for a large library system. We have 28 branches with 15 or more Internet computers at each branch. The limit of four coupons was for each IP address. We maxed out long before closing time. It was a comedy of errors.