FTP

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2012–2023), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with FTP, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 10 complaints

Anonymous access needs a fake non-standard login, sometimes learned only from the MOTD2023-08-11
Clients couldn't enable PASV mode and firewalls blocked FTP connections, causing repeated failures2023-06-13
FTP's user experience is very bad, hard to use2021-05-24
Directory listings are human-readable and vary, making them hard for clients to parse2021-04-19
Users must understand passive and ASCII modes or downloads break or get corrupted2021-04-18
Complex connection setup made it difficult to proxy and manage2020-02-18
Connection drops silently save half-finished files with no warning to the user2019-08-17
Active-mode FTP needs the server to connect back to the client, so it is effectively unusable on the modern internet2019-08-17
Sending files via FTP is clunky and requires technical knowledge most people lack2012-02-24
One wrong file permission or group breaks the upload, forcing SSH fixes and retries2012-01-12