Credit card expiration date is limited

[samuraicat]

I got a gift card for my birthday, yes it's today thank you, and I'm trying to use it to get some games. According to gift cards, they last forever, meaning they have a more later date of expiration. For mine, it's in 2050. But in steam, when you put in your credit card details and go to expiration date to put in the year, it only goes up until 2046. Is there anyway to go above the lmit?

[nullable]

You probably need to open a ticket with support. My guess is that an expiration date 25 years in the future covers over 99% of cards, and they probably thought that was more than enough. So I'm thinking you've just hit an edge case.

I fear they might just shrug and say something to the affect, "Yeah, that's unfortunate but we're not that worried about excluding that edge case." But if they were going to accept it, you'd need their help regardless given the UI limits in place.

[samuraicat]

Originally posted by Snakub Plissken:

You probably need to open a ticket with support. My guess is that an expiration date 25 years in the future covers over 99% of cards, and they probably thought that was more than enough. So I'm thinking you've just hit an edge case.

I fear they might just shrug and say something to the affect, "Yeah, that's unfortunate but we're not that worried about excluding that edge case." But if they were going to accept it, you'd need their help regardless given the UI limits in place.

They should of let you type it in instead of just going through a drop-down menu with limited dates.

[nullable]

Sure. But I can tell you as an experienced developer there's a million and one choices you make that seem perfectly reasonable at the time that you only discover are flawed when you hit the edge case you didn't know existed.

Although even if they let you type it in, it might not matter, the input field validation can still reject anything longer than twenty five years if that's how they set it up. The format of the input doesn't really matter because you still check the data the user posts in the form to make sure it's valid.

Validating data can be tricky and many a developer has made some erroneous assumptions, and oversimplified a complicated topic.

For example, https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ There's no particular reason expiration dates would be immune to that sort of thing either.

Maybe it's something they'll recognize and fix. Hard to say.

[MagicMight]

Assuming it is a valid payment method in your country, add your card to paypal and use it to make your purchase. I just tested it and the expiration date field can be up to 12/2099 with no error showing.