People with no life... ordering takeout

A few days ago at 3-4am there were a few takeout orders that came in for hundreds of items, clearly bogus. Obviously someone has no life and wanted to test their form-filling skills.

The bigger question though - what to allow on a restaurant web site, in terms of information that would be considered acceptable. Certainly one could check for short name entered, but some Asian names are 2 characters long, so that wouldn't really work for all situations. One could limit the order to 10 or 20 items, but then again, when Microsoft places an order for a gathering - that's not going to be sufficient. So, in the end it makes sense to just ignore the losers who have nothing better to do and concentrate on real improvements to the service and support of normal, legitimate customers.

Of course this isn't only a situation with online ordering, I'm sure there are pranksters who call on the phone and do the same thing, although they'd have to use different tactics.

In the end online ordering is still a better alternative, because the restaurant doesn't waste time dealing with bogus orderers, since online ordering service handles the order part on their behalf.

What's your experience? Comment here or tweet @takeoutonline

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