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No spaces or hyphens, please

Pet peeve of the day: Merchants' websites that take credit card information that have a note, "Please don't use spaces or hyphens." Adding spaces really helps me in not erring in typing 16 digits. Software should be able to easily strip out the spaces--why make it hard on the user?

Pet peeve of the month: A merchant's website that proceeds to attempt credit card authorization and fails. I double-check my AMEX number; it's correct. Try again, fail again. As I type in a Visa number, the form cuts me off after the last digit. Aha! So I put in the AMEX number again, only with no spaces. It works.

At least tell me!

Comments

The sad thing about it is that it doesn't take that much effort to write something that can strip out spaces and hyphens.

I've hit a place, or two, that REQUIRED me to enter spaces between the digit groups, and even one site that required hyphens.

Lazy developers: 1
Ease of use for consumers: 0

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