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Account Cleanup
Oct. 8th, 2018 06:01 pmPartly because my son has been nagging me about a variety of lock related things (his current fascination) and partly because I got more of those threatening emails (give me bitcoin! I have an email address and a password from a list that has been floating around for years! Be afraid!), I have been going around and upgrading passwords at rarely / never used accounts and, in some cases, deleting the accounts.
Three experiences stand out.
First, it was a lot harder to change my password at SnapFish (where I do my holiday cards) than it should have been, as a technical side effect of a design choice on their part. Basically, it is not possible to paste in a password — you have to type it letter by letter. This is quite painful with a generated password.
Second, it required _three_ roundtripped requests at Shutterfly to get them to delete the account. I really wanted it gone, in part because I had one time, back in 2010, placed an order with them for some wallet size photos of a friend’s dog because she wanted some pictures of her dog. Nothing went wrong but I don’t order prints often and when I do, I currently use CVS because it is local, and that’s assuming I don’t just print them myself on the photo printer. But Shutterfly DID actually eventually delete my account. When I try my login credentials there, I get the expected error.
Third — and this one is honestly the most breathtaking — I am completely unable to make my account at BrightCellars go away. I tried. Honest, I did. But my credentials still allow login. Good news! I never ordered from them! So there is no risk of someone using my credentials to restart a subscription or anything. But literally, after three or so rounds, they are engaging in significant mis-parsing of English. They aren’t precisely claiming to have closed the account — they are claiming I have never been a member and am not on their mailing list, so what do I care? Meanwhile, if you go to their login screen, you can still login with that email and password.
Now, it is _just possible_ that you can type any damn thing in on that screen and login, and then the account setup doesn’t occur until later. In which case, *shrug*. I don’t know what to say about that other than, having seen how things work on _literally hundreds of other websites_ that strike me as an odd choice. But I think they leave accounts that were created and never turned into memberships live in their database and are using the data to convince people to invest in their company. In other words, if anyone offers you a chance to invest in BrightCellars, my personal advice (remember: I basically never give investment advice) is, Don’t.
Three experiences stand out.
First, it was a lot harder to change my password at SnapFish (where I do my holiday cards) than it should have been, as a technical side effect of a design choice on their part. Basically, it is not possible to paste in a password — you have to type it letter by letter. This is quite painful with a generated password.
Second, it required _three_ roundtripped requests at Shutterfly to get them to delete the account. I really wanted it gone, in part because I had one time, back in 2010, placed an order with them for some wallet size photos of a friend’s dog because she wanted some pictures of her dog. Nothing went wrong but I don’t order prints often and when I do, I currently use CVS because it is local, and that’s assuming I don’t just print them myself on the photo printer. But Shutterfly DID actually eventually delete my account. When I try my login credentials there, I get the expected error.
Third — and this one is honestly the most breathtaking — I am completely unable to make my account at BrightCellars go away. I tried. Honest, I did. But my credentials still allow login. Good news! I never ordered from them! So there is no risk of someone using my credentials to restart a subscription or anything. But literally, after three or so rounds, they are engaging in significant mis-parsing of English. They aren’t precisely claiming to have closed the account — they are claiming I have never been a member and am not on their mailing list, so what do I care? Meanwhile, if you go to their login screen, you can still login with that email and password.
Now, it is _just possible_ that you can type any damn thing in on that screen and login, and then the account setup doesn’t occur until later. In which case, *shrug*. I don’t know what to say about that other than, having seen how things work on _literally hundreds of other websites_ that strike me as an odd choice. But I think they leave accounts that were created and never turned into memberships live in their database and are using the data to convince people to invest in their company. In other words, if anyone offers you a chance to invest in BrightCellars, my personal advice (remember: I basically never give investment advice) is, Don’t.