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Livejournal Has Massive Usability Problems
By Jacob Cohen | May 21, 2007
I wanted to post a comment on a friend’s Livejournal blog, but I had forgotten my password (I don’t use LJ very often). So I tried to send myself the automated password reset e-mail. I got an error:
[Error: Database handle unavailable at /home/lj/cgi-bin/LJ/User.pm line 364. @ w72]
This is problem number one. Why can’t they create a saner error message than this? I tried again, and this time it sent the e-mail.
This arrived very quickly, and I was able to easily reset my password. Next, I wanted to go into my account and change my password from the auto-generated one to something I would remember. So I go to the password change form, enter the info, and hit submit. It recycles with an error message telling me I can’t change my password until my e-mail address is validated. This is usability problem number two. Why show me an option and have me fill out an entire form if it knows beforehand that it won’t work? Why is this even a requirement? I was able to reset my password with a non-validated address.
So I go through the steps of validating my e-mail address, which is basically sending an automated e-mail that is extremely similar to the password reset e-mail. Why didn’t it validate my address when I reset my password?
Once my e-mail address was validated, I went to change my password once again, filling out the form again. I hit submit, and was greeted with the same database error as before. I try one last time, and now I get this:
There was an error processing your request: Your IP address is temporarily banned for exceeding the login failure rate.
This is horrible. More than half of the “login failures” were caused by their own software’s instability or unclear requirements. So now I have to wait some unspecified amount of time before I can try again, and I still haven’t been able to post the comment, which was all I wanted to do in the first place!
Topics: General |
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:08 pm
its ridiculous. I cant even veiw my journal now and thats one of many problems ive had in the last week. First i couldnt edit my journal, then it let me for like 2 seconds then changed my whole journal to a design i didnt select. And now i cant even see it. Have wrote about 3 help requests and heard naff all.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:41 am
jup, can’t read my own journal either, hope it doesen’t take days or something like this until my ip is available again