August 20, 2007
Sunday afternoon I decided to sign up with an online dating site. At this point what do I have to lose?
Well, aside from the usual moronic hoop-jumping ("your user name can't be similar to your e-mail address, since that would make things convenient") it seems that match.com doesn't like my kind.
After picking a new user name that satisfied the system, it told me "you can't use that e-mail address to register with." Apparently they don't like Yahoo addresses. Well, this is going to be a problem, since I don't trust them with the address I try to keep spam-free.
I figured that was the deal-breaker right there. But then I figured I could use a screen-grab of the error message. Something about an online dating site -- which isn't exactly getting the cream of the crop pretty much by definition -- serving up a bowlful of GTFO amused me. So I tried to create an account again.
This time I used my Hotmail address, just in case. And I got a new error: "That user name is already in use." Hey, maybe it signed me up after all. This just might be worth a look.
It didn't take either of my usual I-don't-give-a-damn passwords, so I asked it to send me my password. I plugged in my user name and my birthday (I know I got that part right at least) and it kept routing me back to the forgot-password form, saying "please enter your birthdate to continue."
Well, I've made sure I'm allowing cookies, so it seems that the thing is just utterly put off by me. Maybe I should take that as a sign.
Meh. After all that I was able to sign up with a different user name and my Hotmail account. Apparently the site's error handling rides the short bus to work.
Now to see what's there.
