My brilliant wheeze for solving login annoyances on ticket-selling sites

You know how everyone has a blind spot, something that they're irrationally (or possibly rationally) irritated by and their anger is a bit out of proportion to how annoying the thing is, when compared to other annoying things? I'm a bit like that with ticketing websites that force you to log in when buying tickets.

Here's my new plan -
1. Meekly create an account and log in
2. Buy tickets
3. Request that the site deletes your record from its system. As far as I'm aware they must comply with this request (in the UK at least).

This means that in future you'll be able to re-use your preferred email address as you are now creating a 'new' account. Of course you'll have to ask them to keep deleting your account afterwards. This is a bit 'cutting off your nose to spite your face' but how else will they learn ;)

What I don't understand is why everyone isn't sufficiently annoyed about this forced-login irritation, to the point that we all down tools and have a massive collective huff about it.

This article - the $300 million button - gives an example of a retail site which found that sales increased dramatically when they removed the requirement to log in.

Analysis of the site's database showed that "...45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested."

I've just tried to buy tickets from a site and had to give them my email address to send me the tickets (fine). However I discovered that I couldn't use that email address because I'd previously registered it to create an account (in 2013) to buy tickets for something else. Yes it would have been quicker to use a different email address and create a new account (though I'm quite convinced I've no real need of an account in the first place).

The process went like this, to an accompaniment of grumbling:

• choose the 'forgotten password' option
• receive an emailed link to change the new password
• click that link which opens a new tab to change the password. 

I now had my original tab open (where I wasn't logged in but with my ticket selected ready for purchase) and the new tab open (where I was logged in but with no record of the ticket). On some sites this is a bit fatal, but fortunately refreshing the tabs solved things here.

The site had remembered my address from but I still had to type in my card details so very little time was saved in the process. I realise I'm probaby a bit of an outlier in that I know my card details off by heart but even if I didn't the card's in my wallet which is usually in my pocket. Obviously I know my address off by heart.

Every time this login-fail-and-recover-password cycle has happened it's taken me more time (and annoyance) to recover my account than it would have taken me to type in all of my details from scratch.

Retailers: please let me buy tickets without having to create an account or log in. Those who prefer to log in can still use the option, if they wish, but don't make it a condition of me buying tickets.

Edit
I've just seen a 'tweet this post' link on another website and wanted to try it here. Feel free to ignore it, it won't actually send a tweet until you click 'post tweet' after editing it. I'm not even sure it will work as I've not set anything up, just adapted the HTML code and linked it to my post instead. Tweet this post

Edit 7 January 2017
I've just tried to buy one ticket to an event and in one sense failed and in another over-succeeded. The online site asked me to create an account, which I did. Fortunately I don't seem to have bought tickets with them before because it let me have a new account rather than the 'but you already have an account, please spend the next ten minutes recovering your password and logging in) so that went quite well.

The bit that went wrong was the payment. It turns out there's no option for using a debit card (this wasn't completely clear to me until after I'd entered my card details a couple of times) so I thought I'd use PayPal which I use at most once a year. I reset my password, successfully judging from the on-screen woohooing & email confirming this, but on trying to log in to the payment tab / window rather than the password reset tab / window it refused me and then said my account was locked.

Then I rang the box office and I'm afraid to say I was a bit ranty, but apologised and asked to buy a ticket with my debit card. My card was declined, which is unexpected, so we tried again, and the same thing happened. On ringing the bank I found that there was no problem with my card or account and that there had been a delay in processing the (by now, two) payments so the end result is that I've paid twice for my ticket and am every bit as livid as I was when I originally wrote this post, but for slightly different reasons.

Retailers: please make sure people can pay with debit cards! My other point about not needing an account remains.

Further reading
Don't force users to register before they can buy (July 2015)

Things I can't do on Firefox 36.0.4 - you?

Edit 2 April 2015 - I've upgraded to Firefox 37 but it hasn't improved things at all. I do find it quite interesting that Firefox upgraded itself to 36.0.4 last week and here's another upgrade, though it hasn't fixed the problems.

Edit 1 April 2015 - I've tried disabling plug-ins and add-ons but I still can't do any of the things below. I've added some screenshots in the hope that people might recognise something and go "oh, I know what you've done*"

*the problem began by itself, since then I've also tried to clear cache. Enabling and disabling add-ons looked like it might help (with Wordpress stats in particular) but refreshing the page just took me back to square one.

Here's what everything looks like, click to enlarge the pictures.

WordPress statistics page

Woto: I'm logged in (OAuth with Twitter) but can't see my pages

Can't log in to Storify (or click on 'next page' on anyone else's Storify stories). Permanently stuck at OAuth window which then fails.

Probably quarter to midnight not best time to demonstrate fact that I see no aircraft on FlightRadar but even at expected times there's a complete lack of aircraft icons. Also I can't move the map, I don't live near enough to Heathrow for this map zzom to be of much use to me.

-----------------

I think I have a new version of Firefox, it seems fairly awful so far - must have unwittingly updated it earlier this evening.

Here's a list of things that I've found I can no longer do with the latest version of Firefox (36.0.4) but which I could do fine on the previous one. Not sure how to fix this, short of waiting for the next update, which I hope will be soon.


Things I don't seem to be able to do include...

• view my Wordpress.com sites' stats pages - they all show up as a blank grey page (fine on Safari)
• use FlightRadar.com - no aircraft appear and although I can zoom in or out I can't use the grab and move tool to move the map (fine on Safari)
• use Storify properly - it stops at the end of the first page and the 'read next page' link doesn't click to go anywhere (infinite scrolling works fine on Safari so I never see this button, it worked fine on the previous version of Firefox too)

Annoyance with printing stuff from a website - any ideas?

Printing from websites has always been a miserable experience. I usually do quite a lot of pre-emptive tinkering on the print preview page before I press 'send'.

I've noticed that quite often the preview version bears little relation to the on-screen view. I presume this is due to the use of style sheets (CSS). These are part of the underlying code (as is html and things like that) which determines what the page will look like on the screen.

I don't want to print the underlying code, but the final page. Unfortunately what I get is the underlying code.

To see what I mean compare the Print Preview option for your own Gmail inbox (looks the same) and your Twitter feed (looks hideous).

When faced with this sort of thing the quickest solution, for me, has been to forego any efforts to print it as real text and just take screencaptures, knit those together in Paint, paste into Word document and print. This works well but is fiddly and I've shown quite a few people how to do it as they'd not found a solution either.

Surely EVERYONE has this problem. How do you get round it and is there a better way?

There are some customisable options in the Print Preview options menu (Windows 7) but none make the page look as pretty as it might.

(And no, copying and pasting the text doesn't entirely solve the problem - it solves a different problem in that I can format the text any way I like, but it doesn't let the web page look like the web page).

More Word glitches solved - troublesome HYPERLINKs and apostrophes

Sporadically (usually after a Windows update I think) my work computer's version of Word starts to look like this, with embedded URLs showing up with the format { HYPERLINK "http://www. " }

Before

Screenshot of shouty hyperlinks

After

Screenshot of normal embedded hyperlinks

In a few weeks or months it will probably do it again and I'll google the solution. It's Alt+F9.

Information found from http://www.codingforums.com/archive/index.php/t-39782.html (switch your sound off, the website has an annoying autoplay advert but the info works) - apparently I'm toggling field code shortcuts.

I suppose this way of acknowledging a hyperlink is just a more overt equivalent of hovering over the link so that the URL pops up, as it does on the web.

For some reason this doesn't appear to work on my version of Word anymore and if I want to see what the URL is I have to pretend to edit it (right click, edit hyperlink). One day I'll add that to my solved glitches too but the workaround works fine I suppose.

Bonus solved annoyance
Shortly after I fixed that I found that apostrophes were playing up. I tried to type "you've" but it ended up as "you' ve" with a single enlarged space between the apostrophe and the letter V. Googling brought up a forum post in which several answers were offered (I found selecting all the text and changing the font was the one that worked for me). The solution was to be found here
http://www.proz.com/forum/office_applications/76284-word_adds_a_biiiig_space_after_an_apostrophe.html

I've written before on the odd characters that Google adds to the address after you've done your search.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&sa=X&ei=qb9Z[deleted]AfHjoCoDQ&ved=0C[deleted]AQ&q=Word+gap+after+apostrophe&spell=1&biw=1307&bih=7[deleted]3

This is the one that you'd share with someone else (unless you just said "search for... on Google"). It's not particularly human readable (at least not Jo-readable) so I don't know what it means - I've deleted random bits of it so it won't actually work as a live address.

Given that the amended version below works perfectly well I don't see why all these extra characters should get to be involved.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Word+gap+after+apostrophe

More posts in the Word tips series...