Being a freelancer for many, many years I have see a few crazy requirements (and crazy clients) in my time. One of the craziest and funniest ones to me was a client (who you have probably seen on TV many times) that wanted a task manager website with a kanban board and push notifications, running on a high-end wall mounted touch screen specifically tailored for feeding the pets only locally within his home because "the kids" were not feeding them on a regular basis. I didn't feel bad at all taking his money on that project and still laugh about it every time it crosses my mind. :-)

Not so much a technical requirement as a business requirement.

One time I was working for a design company that was building a website for a local business owner. We were building a website that included online shopping (e-commerce), but a requirement of doing business with this owner was that all our communication had to be hand-written and delivered in person.

I guess talking about the design details of the website over email was too risky in some way… but it doesn't make sense to me that somebody who refuses to email because of lack of security when talking about non-confidential things would build a website where they would ask shoppers to enter their payment details.

Either way, I remember being at the office when a new stack of hand-written notes for website content was delivered and we all stopped what we were doing to type up the written notes so we could put the content on the website.

✏️📜🤨⁉️💻

Currently, a project.

Est. Time to finish is 1st May. Est. Time of work 6 Weeks. Still no specs.

But no shift in the deadline ;D .... loving it. No testing plan, no HSM Code, no C++ Code, no Java Code, no python Code. But the buzzwords Blockchain and Crypto-Currency.

Lets see where this is going :).

One I butt heads with regularly -- still having to support IE 5.5 in 2018. See, a lot of free clinics, mental healthcare facilities, and so forth are ridiculously cash strapped because of clients with no insurance, no way to pay, and a mission to NOT turn away people in need of mental health care...

... and as such they're stuck with outdated hardware that was low-cost junk when new, like Geode and Samurai powered thin-clients running windows CE out of ROM.

You have to remember, IE6 didn't reach Windows CE/Mobile until 2008 when Mobile 6 came out; so until then almost EVERY embedded Windows CE device had IE5 as the ONLY browser choice. What, you missed the big 6 on 6 party? So did everyone else! Serious case of 'worse late than ever' in that IE 6 "finally" made it onto windows CE just in time for IE9 to come out for desktop. Then they wonder why are considered a joke in the mobile space.

The money doesn't exist for them to go out and replace everything with even cheap options like nettops, so it's cheaper to just have someone like myself keep their old in-house crapplets and web-facing stuff fully supported.

Though this is surprisingly NOT as hard as people make it out to be, if you just stick to semantic markup, conventional functionality, separation of presentation from content, and properly plan for graceful degradation. It will WORK, doesn't mean it will be pretty. They don't get some drop shadows or rounded corners, or some goofy bit of "gee ain't it neat" scripting, OH WELL!

You make it work, then you enhance it with the new stuff in a manner that if said "new stuff" fails, the page is still useful and usable to the user.

It's still a batshit requirement though, supporting twenty year old browser engines.

Craziest feature I have built was social login.

It is not a normal social login, here the user has to sign up with social account and then they can login with their social login.

I have never ever seen this kind of social login in my internet experience.

I had one client at the consulting firm I used to work at ask us to basically create a spec (they didn't want anything built until they "were sure we knew everything") for essentially Microsoft Excel for the oil and gas industry.

We asked them to just export the data as an XLSX to let customers use Excel itself and told them they didn't have the budget to recreate a 2 billion dollar R&D product from Microsoft.

Long story short, they paid over 400k for a 800 page spec, and never built it. The consultants involved (myself and others) tried to get our agency to walk, but the money was just too appetizing for the higher ups. It was sad.

Once our CEO in one of the startups I worked at had asked us to introduce a complex feature in our application. I still remember him saying

Guys. It's a dead simple feature. It just a matter of introducing one boolean variable somewhere in your code and it should be done! I'll give two days as extra buffer, finish it and put it in the production.

And it took us almost a month to build and deploy that feature.