I have now had two separate “customer support” people from First Great Western write me condescending messages explaining that an error message of “URL is syntactically invalid” must be my fault for entering my credit card details incorrectly.
Sadly I am fairly sure that if I had submitted exactly the same bug report using a male name I would have got a lot more respect.
I suppose it’s possible that they could be right, if, for some reason, they used a php script which included the credit card number as part of the URL it passed (you know, the way the URL for this page here uses the page number of 7523).
Of course, if that were so, their entire web development team should be lined up and shot. Sending a credit card number in the clear like that would be frankly (and maybe literally, depending on data protection laws) criminal.
So, yeah, I think “They are assholes” is a more likely explanation.
Regardless of what the problem is, their web site should not cause browser errors on the basis of user input. It’s like being able to crash Excel by entering the wrong characters in a spreadsheet cell.
However, their “customer support” team appears to be fixated on the “blame the customer for everything” strategy.