7 ms·

That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half

by mrtksn 1y ago

That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no. It actually makes sense to have a paid service that makes this abomination less painful. Though they work with VFS Global for collecting the applications and relevant documents, the VFS Global itself is an abomination and doesn't help with the handling of the form filling anyway. Recently EU streamlined the Schengen visa application process for Turkish citizens as those "visa agencies" that are the official agencies and the only way to apply for a visa for many countries don't actually help with anything and are scamming people by selling the "good hours" for the visa appointment on the black market. An agency was dropped for this and the scams by agencies were listed among the reasons to streamline the application process. Both with US and EU people are losing scholarships etc. due to outrageous wait times that are sometimes are years ahead or there's an issue with the systems handling the applications. I guess there must be an opportunity there to fix all this together with smaller stuff like handling transliteration and character encodings, I wonder if some of those scam site are not scams and actually help with it. An AI agent can be useful here.

paganel 1y ago
The hard truth of it all is that both the US and (partially) the EU don’t want to make this easier because seeing as wanting “outside” people is now a political liability. You may want to adjust your expectations around that.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  Turkish tourist are desired, Turks love spending money on restaurants and activities especially since the prices in Turkey have become more expensive than most of the EU. Greeks even introduced special non-Schengen on-arrival visa valid on the Greek islands especially for the Turks. Besides that, EU has "green passport" exception for the Turkish nationals, where they can travel visa-free on this kind of passport that is provided to individuals that meet certain criteria and millions of such passports were issued. The rejection rates are also not bad and EU has a "return agreement" with Turkey, which is designed to keep the middle eastern refugees in Turkey(essentially, if you come from Turkey EU can send you back to Turkey right away ). Crime rates for Turks show up among the lowest ones, unlike others from the region. So I don't think that EU is trying to reduce visas for Turks.
  - rat9988 1y ago
    You are looking at it from Turkish perspective unfortunately.
    - mrtksn 1y ago
      I am EU citizen, I happen to know the Turkish perspective only because spent some years in Turkey and in fact it is the Turkish perspective that that EU doesn't want them and intentionally makes things harder but the moment you look at what's actually going on you see that this is not the case, just a Turkish fantasy about the "evil West and snobby Europeans". Considering that last year 50K Turks applied for asylum in EU and another 100K overstayed their visa, IMHO EU can be considered pretty generous actually with only 15% rejection rate since Turkey is the 2nd country with most applications after China. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/visa-applications-reach-117-million-eu-and-schengen-associated-countries-2025-05-20_en https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/visa-applications-rea... https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Asylum_applications_-_annual_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
      - jimz 1y ago
        B-visa rejection rate for Turkey in FY24, as per the US State Department, was 19.78%, btw. https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Non-Immigrant-Statistics/RefusalRates/FY24.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Non-Im...
      - peterfirefly 1y ago
        [flagged]
        mrtksn 1y ago
        >I'm Danish and we have lots of Turks. They are generally much nicer than the Danes but almost all of them are dunces That's rich coming from someone who doesn't understand what the Schengen visa is about. FYI it's not about settling in Denmark, it's for up to 90 days stays in 180 periods for tourism and business purposes. But hey, the inventors of of the mRNA vaccine are both Turkish immigrants to Germany and there are plenty of other quite successful Turkish immigrants in all kind of industries and the academia. Maybe the problem isn't Turks but you? Thank god your racism isn't shared by that many Europeans.
- teknopaul 1y ago
  [flagged]
- eviks 1y ago
  That doesn't explain the same poor operational quality before it became a liability
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
rwmj 1y ago
You might be making the assumption that the US wants to make the process easier.
- cromka 1y ago
  You use the same system for Business visas. Hard to imagine US wouldn’t want those as easy as possible.
  - nkoren 1y ago
    Hard to imagine that the US wouldn't be as paranoid, self-sabotaging, and bureaucratically inept as possible? </sarcasm>
  - jimz 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - cogogo 1y ago
      My wife, a green card holder, applied for citizenship in April and was naturalized yesterday (from an EU country). Not that I don’t believe it could be true but where are you getting the 3-4yr timeline? If that’s accurate she/we may have dodged a massive bullet.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        Spouses always get better treatment as there is a voter who would be mad otherwise. They check for scam marriages but otherwise hurry the process through - if they don't a voter contacts their congressman to push the process. That voter will also likely know a lot of other voters and thus influence the next election while someone not married is unlikely to have that local network to use.
        cogogo 1y ago
        I would love to see data that backs this up. While definitely plausible the pathway she followed to naturalization was based on time in country and not our marriage. I didn’t need to push but I’ve generally found my congressman (who is also almost our neighbor) to be pretty unresponsive on any other issue. My understanding - which may not be correct - is the length of the process primarily depends on your country of origin and secondarily on how you are eligible. Very interested in any source showing that a relatively normal process has pushed out from months to years.
karel-3d 1y ago
As I wrote elsewhere; they subcontract the bot protection to F5, an external company that I see for some reason a lot on old/horrible banking websites.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  F5 is huge in enterprise and academia for firewall/VPN/load-balancer services
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
The VISA appointment scheduling site rate limits to a ridiculous degree these days. As in refresh your page within 10seconds and get a 429 error. That's probably because of the fact that the appointments are near impossible to get, they only allow booking a few months out and it's always completely booked. So everyone was refreshing (or if clever botting) to get an appointment slot.
supportengineer 1y ago
>> the system just kick her out The "waterfall model" is a toxic way of thinking that pervades corporate management. Simplistic minds can't fathom any states other than "done" or "not done". Corporations are determined to crush the human soul. That is why it's not a progressive series of forms, saving your progress all along.
- smithkl42 1y ago
  More-or-less agreed about the waterfall model, but you can't blame horrific US government website performance on "corporations" or "corporate management". This is precisely the sort of thing that would get you fired in any real-world corporation that wants to survive, and it's precisely the fact that you can't get fired by the federal government that allows this sort of thing to continue.
dansimco 1y ago
I had this problem too last year. I found, at the time, it was the website was poorly managing the session in some browsers causing the timeout countdown to not be reset on activity. I had to find a windows computer and use microsoft edge I think (maybe it was chrome). But no browser on my mac would not have that issue.
sharno 1y ago
Whenever I'm filling a long form on an official website, I feel like I'm racing against an invisible clock because of this session time out thing that happened to me countless times.
gmueckl 1y ago
I had to deal with the DS-160 multiple times over the year. I don't think you give justice to how bad this website really is. I have started to notice that these "timeouts" are very random. At the worst times, the session "times out" immediately after login. These random logouts happens more frequently during certain times of the day and seems to follow a semi-predictable pattern. It is almost certainly tied to system load in some way. Also, the site's HTML and JavaScript are bloated beyond hope for what should be a fairly simple set of web forms. And itnhas been thisnway since at least 2018 with exactly zero improvements.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  One thing a developer sat in DC or SV with a 5G iPhone 16 doesn't realize too, is that if you are visiting these web sites with a phone plan that has a tiny monthly data allowance then this bloat can blow out an entire month in one sitting. I worked with people on parole that were given free phones to use for job applications, finding their way around etc, and they would only get 3GB data a month. Some of the sites they visited were dropping 250MB of payload on the home page. You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    > You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city. Sure, I'll do my best to try it. I'll approximate the throttle by limiting chrome to 128kbps, 500ms delay, and 5% packet loss for fun. With a fresh incognito session, google responds to "here to 4th street" in 10 seconds, and when I click to open maps it needs just under two minutes to load. Then I can click on the transit option and it needs another 10 seconds to update. Not too bad for a cold cache. If I do it again with a hot cache it only takes 20 seconds to go through the whole process. And I expect the app to be similar to the hot cache situation. Even with 64kbps I'd expect reasonable results. Do any cell providers throttle worse than that? I agree with your argument about bloat in general, but google in particular has a lot of good engineering resources and tries to work well on bad connections. Also I would be in favor of some spectrum licensing rules that say you can't throttle below 1Mbps...
svnee 1y ago
Hey, this is actually something I have a keen interest in as I'm fighting my government (as an MP) to drop those scammers where possible. Do you have any media links to send me about them selling the "good hours" on the black market? Even if the US has a horrible visa system – as I can attest, despite only having to do it every 5 years – the EU countries could benefit from attracting talent by being more welcoming. So that is part of my mission as an MP and tech-entrepreneur. Any help and pointers is welcome.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  Hi, about the Schengen visa situation in Turkey you can find articles like these that describe how the appointments are on the black market(In Turkish but I'm sure AI will do good job translating): https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cz5r2l43kn2o https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cz5r2l43kn2o https://medyascope.tv/2024/01/22/vize-sorunu-kontrolden-cikti-randevular-karaborsaya-dustu/ https://medyascope.tv/2024/01/22/vize-sorunu-kontrolden-cikt... On the social media the anecdotes differ but some say they were able to get the visa appointments bots, others say it was agency personel selling it to them under the table. Maybe its really the agency personel, or maybe it's people running bots to snap appointments and sell those pretending to be from the agency - can't know for sure but there are multiple services where people purchase appointments unofficially. In general the news situation in Turkey isn't very good as with the law enforcement but as you can see even BBC took notice. Generally speaking, these visa agencies are very unfriendly and unreachable. They seem to just collect the money, provide no personalized help at all. My GF had some questions about her US visa application, we were not able to reach VFS Global. The phone numbers provided don't work, it's not even like taking long to speak with a human, the phone just gives you calling error. She previously used the same company for her Schengen visa for a company event in Paris, of course unreachable again and no appointments available. Because she works at a French corporation, she was able to ask a high ranking French person in the company who has a contact with the French embassy and they arranged the appointment shortly.
dent9 1y ago
> In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no. No clue if this specific instance if scam but such scams have indeed been done before https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go > According to Ablakwa, a locally recruited staff member and "collaborators" were allegedly involved in a "fraudulent" scheme whereby they extracted money from visa and passport applicants. > It is alleged that the scheme consisted of creating an unauthorised link on the embassy's website to redirect visa and passport applicants to a private firm where they were "charged extra for multiple services" without the knowledge of the foreign ministry. > Ablakwa added that the staff member "kept the entire proceeds" in their private account, and that the scheme had been going on for five years. > Applicants seeking visas were charged unapproved fees ranging from almost $30 (£22) to $60 by the private firm.

by mrtksn 1y ago

paganel 1y ago

The hard truth of it all is that both the US and (partially) the EU don’t want to make this easier because seeing as wanting “outside” people is now a political liability. You may want to adjust your expectations around that.

mrtksn 1y ago
Turkish tourist are desired, Turks love spending money on restaurants and activities especially since the prices in Turkey have become more expensive than most of the EU. Greeks even introduced special non-Schengen on-arrival visa valid on the Greek islands especially for the Turks. Besides that, EU has "green passport" exception for the Turkish nationals, where they can travel visa-free on this kind of passport that is provided to individuals that meet certain criteria and millions of such passports were issued. The rejection rates are also not bad and EU has a "return agreement" with Turkey, which is designed to keep the middle eastern refugees in Turkey(essentially, if you come from Turkey EU can send you back to Turkey right away ). Crime rates for Turks show up among the lowest ones, unlike others from the region. So I don't think that EU is trying to reduce visas for Turks.
- rat9988 1y ago
  You are looking at it from Turkish perspective unfortunately.
  - mrtksn 1y ago
    I am EU citizen, I happen to know the Turkish perspective only because spent some years in Turkey and in fact it is the Turkish perspective that that EU doesn't want them and intentionally makes things harder but the moment you look at what's actually going on you see that this is not the case, just a Turkish fantasy about the "evil West and snobby Europeans". Considering that last year 50K Turks applied for asylum in EU and another 100K overstayed their visa, IMHO EU can be considered pretty generous actually with only 15% rejection rate since Turkey is the 2nd country with most applications after China. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/visa-applications-reach-117-million-eu-and-schengen-associated-countries-2025-05-20_en https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/visa-applications-rea... https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Asylum_applications_-_annual_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
    - jimz 1y ago
      B-visa rejection rate for Turkey in FY24, as per the US State Department, was 19.78%, btw. https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Non-Immigrant-Statistics/RefusalRates/FY24.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Non-Im...
    - peterfirefly 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - mrtksn 1y ago
        >I'm Danish and we have lots of Turks. They are generally much nicer than the Danes but almost all of them are dunces That's rich coming from someone who doesn't understand what the Schengen visa is about. FYI it's not about settling in Denmark, it's for up to 90 days stays in 180 periods for tourism and business purposes. But hey, the inventors of of the mRNA vaccine are both Turkish immigrants to Germany and there are plenty of other quite successful Turkish immigrants in all kind of industries and the academia. Maybe the problem isn't Turks but you? Thank god your racism isn't shared by that many Europeans.
teknopaul 1y ago
[flagged]
eviks 1y ago
That doesn't explain the same poor operational quality before it became a liability
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

rwmj 1y ago

You might be making the assumption that the US wants to make the process easier.

cromka 1y ago
You use the same system for Business visas. Hard to imagine US wouldn’t want those as easy as possible.
- nkoren 1y ago
  Hard to imagine that the US wouldn't be as paranoid, self-sabotaging, and bureaucratically inept as possible? </sarcasm>
- jimz 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - cogogo 1y ago
    My wife, a green card holder, applied for citizenship in April and was naturalized yesterday (from an EU country). Not that I don’t believe it could be true but where are you getting the 3-4yr timeline? If that’s accurate she/we may have dodged a massive bullet.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Spouses always get better treatment as there is a voter who would be mad otherwise. They check for scam marriages but otherwise hurry the process through - if they don't a voter contacts their congressman to push the process. That voter will also likely know a lot of other voters and thus influence the next election while someone not married is unlikely to have that local network to use.
      - cogogo 1y ago
        I would love to see data that backs this up. While definitely plausible the pathway she followed to naturalization was based on time in country and not our marriage. I didn’t need to push but I’ve generally found my congressman (who is also almost our neighbor) to be pretty unresponsive on any other issue. My understanding - which may not be correct - is the length of the process primarily depends on your country of origin and secondarily on how you are eligible. Very interested in any source showing that a relatively normal process has pushed out from months to years.

karel-3d 1y ago

As I wrote elsewhere; they subcontract the bot protection to F5, an external company that I see for some reason a lot on old/horrible banking websites.

DaSHacka 1y ago
F5 is huge in enterprise and academia for firewall/VPN/load-balancer services

AnotherGoodName 1y ago

The VISA appointment scheduling site rate limits to a ridiculous degree these days. As in refresh your page within 10seconds and get a 429 error. That's probably because of the fact that the appointments are near impossible to get, they only allow booking a few months out and it's always completely booked. So everyone was refreshing (or if clever botting) to get an appointment slot.

supportengineer 1y ago

>> the system just kick her out The "waterfall model" is a toxic way of thinking that pervades corporate management. Simplistic minds can't fathom any states other than "done" or "not done". Corporations are determined to crush the human soul. That is why it's not a progressive series of forms, saving your progress all along.

smithkl42 1y ago
More-or-less agreed about the waterfall model, but you can't blame horrific US government website performance on "corporations" or "corporate management". This is precisely the sort of thing that would get you fired in any real-world corporation that wants to survive, and it's precisely the fact that you can't get fired by the federal government that allows this sort of thing to continue.

dansimco 1y ago

I had this problem too last year. I found, at the time, it was the website was poorly managing the session in some browsers causing the timeout countdown to not be reset on activity. I had to find a windows computer and use microsoft edge I think (maybe it was chrome). But no browser on my mac would not have that issue.

sharno 1y ago

Whenever I'm filling a long form on an official website, I feel like I'm racing against an invisible clock because of this session time out thing that happened to me countless times.

gmueckl 1y ago

I had to deal with the DS-160 multiple times over the year. I don't think you give justice to how bad this website really is. I have started to notice that these "timeouts" are very random. At the worst times, the session "times out" immediately after login. These random logouts happens more frequently during certain times of the day and seems to follow a semi-predictable pattern. It is almost certainly tied to system load in some way. Also, the site's HTML and JavaScript are bloated beyond hope for what should be a fairly simple set of web forms. And itnhas been thisnway since at least 2018 with exactly zero improvements.

qingcharles 1y ago
One thing a developer sat in DC or SV with a 5G iPhone 16 doesn't realize too, is that if you are visiting these web sites with a phone plan that has a tiny monthly data allowance then this bloat can blow out an entire month in one sitting. I worked with people on parole that were given free phones to use for job applications, finding their way around etc, and they would only get 3GB data a month. Some of the sites they visited were dropping 250MB of payload on the home page. You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  > You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city. Sure, I'll do my best to try it. I'll approximate the throttle by limiting chrome to 128kbps, 500ms delay, and 5% packet loss for fun. With a fresh incognito session, google responds to "here to 4th street" in 10 seconds, and when I click to open maps it needs just under two minutes to load. Then I can click on the transit option and it needs another 10 seconds to update. Not too bad for a cold cache. If I do it again with a hot cache it only takes 20 seconds to go through the whole process. And I expect the app to be similar to the hot cache situation. Even with 64kbps I'd expect reasonable results. Do any cell providers throttle worse than that? I agree with your argument about bloat in general, but google in particular has a lot of good engineering resources and tries to work well on bad connections. Also I would be in favor of some spectrum licensing rules that say you can't throttle below 1Mbps...

svnee 1y ago

Hey, this is actually something I have a keen interest in as I'm fighting my government (as an MP) to drop those scammers where possible. Do you have any media links to send me about them selling the "good hours" on the black market? Even if the US has a horrible visa system – as I can attest, despite only having to do it every 5 years – the EU countries could benefit from attracting talent by being more welcoming. So that is part of my mission as an MP and tech-entrepreneur. Any help and pointers is welcome.

mrtksn 1y ago
Hi, about the Schengen visa situation in Turkey you can find articles like these that describe how the appointments are on the black market(In Turkish but I'm sure AI will do good job translating): https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cz5r2l43kn2o https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cz5r2l43kn2o https://medyascope.tv/2024/01/22/vize-sorunu-kontrolden-cikti-randevular-karaborsaya-dustu/ https://medyascope.tv/2024/01/22/vize-sorunu-kontrolden-cikt... On the social media the anecdotes differ but some say they were able to get the visa appointments bots, others say it was agency personel selling it to them under the table. Maybe its really the agency personel, or maybe it's people running bots to snap appointments and sell those pretending to be from the agency - can't know for sure but there are multiple services where people purchase appointments unofficially. In general the news situation in Turkey isn't very good as with the law enforcement but as you can see even BBC took notice. Generally speaking, these visa agencies are very unfriendly and unreachable. They seem to just collect the money, provide no personalized help at all. My GF had some questions about her US visa application, we were not able to reach VFS Global. The phone numbers provided don't work, it's not even like taking long to speak with a human, the phone just gives you calling error. She previously used the same company for her Schengen visa for a company event in Paris, of course unreachable again and no appointments available. Because she works at a French corporation, she was able to ask a high ranking French person in the company who has a contact with the French embassy and they arranged the appointment shortly.

dent9 1y ago

> In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no. No clue if this specific instance if scam but such scams have indeed been done before https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go > According to Ablakwa, a locally recruited staff member and "collaborators" were allegedly involved in a "fraudulent" scheme whereby they extracted money from visa and passport applicants. > It is alleged that the scheme consisted of creating an unauthorised link on the embassy's website to redirect visa and passport applicants to a private firm where they were "charged extra for multiple services" without the knowledge of the foreign ministry. > Ablakwa added that the staff member "kept the entire proceeds" in their private account, and that the scheme had been going on for five years. > Applicants seeking visas were charged unapproved fees ranging from almost $30 (£22) to $60 by the private firm.