The fun of remote working and VPN

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK and the country went in to lockdown back in March 2020, causing most people to have to work from home, the reliance on remote access VPNs become a crucial part of being able to keep working from home. During the first few months, we had a lot of people complaining their VPN was slow at time, but it wouldn’t effect everyone, it would only ever be one or two people, 5-10 minutes later the issue would disappear. Of course it was device or ISP related.

So colleagues would complain about this in group chats, so I decided I would create a website called downloadmorevpn.com where I got the idea from the downloadmoreram.com. So when they started to complain I would link in this website as a joke, which got enough laughs to warrant paying for the domain.

The website is very simple, you click “Download More VPN”, which runs a bit of Javascript which slowly increases the loading bar until you reach the message “More VPN successfully downloaded”. The website is harmless and doesn’t do anything but its the comedic factor of the website.

The JavaScript code below is how I went about the progress bar. Essentially I just the random maths function in JavaScript to process the bar random amounts each time, so every time some uses the site the progress bar always loads at different rates.

function IncreaseLoading(i)
{
    if(i == 100)
    {
        $( "#DownloadMoreVPN" ).html("<div class=\"alert alert-success\" role=\"alert\">More VPN successfully downloaded</div>");
        return;
    }
    if (i == 1)
    {
        var i = randomIntRange(i,30);
    }
    else
    {
        var i = randomIntRange(i,100);
    }  

    $( "#DownloadMoreVPNBar" ).width(i+"%");
    setTimeout(function()
    {
        IncreaseLoading(i);
    }, 300);
}

function randomIntRange(min, max) {
    return Math.floor(Math.random() * (max - min + 1) + min);
}