What's the password?

   So, I thought I'd see what Blogger had to offer. Blogger.com was the first blogging service I investigated several years ago when I first thought about starting one of these things. Long before anyone at AOL had even considered offering journals, blogging was a hot trend on the web. Blogger was one of the first companies to offer tools to the average user to make blogging easy to do. I joined up, and went about the process of starting a blog.
   At that time, Blogger had two options. If you had your own ftp space in which to store the files that make up your blog, you could use it, and have an ad free blog. If you did not, you could use Blogger's space, and they would place a banner ad at the top of your blog to pay for that usage. Not wanting ads on my blog, I chose the former option, only to find out that the Blogger software would not work with AOL's ftp format for some reason. I abandoned the attempt, and the whole blog concept at that time, and about two years later, started AWV here on AOL.
   Fast forward to today, and I have been fairly happy here in AOL J-Land for about a year and a half. Reading the many former AOL journalers who have moved to other services discuss the new features they can make use of that AOL does not offer awoke in me the desire to explore some of those things as well. I typed www.blogger.com into my browser, and looked to see what I could see. My first thought was that I had already registered with blogger, albeit several years ago, perhaps I didn't need to go through the entire sign up process again. Tap, tap, tap, went my finger against my temple, trying to prod some kind of memory of what my login ID and password might have been.
   My first attempt was met with an error message saying that the login ID was not found. My second attempt resulted in an error message saying that my password was wrong. Progress! I had found the right login ID. Now I just had to figure out what my password was. I tried several passwords that I have used in various places over the last couple of years with no success, and finally succumbed and clicked on the link that says: "did you forget your password, schmuck?"
   That took me to a screen with two options. The first was to type in my user ID. After doing that, and hitting enter, I was told that an e-mail had been dispatched to the e-mail address associated with that account, and should arrive within fifteen minutes. Nope. Fifteen minutes, an hour, twenty four hours, no e-mail was forthcoming. The second option was to type in my e-mail address, and an e-mail would be dispatched with my correct User ID and Password contained therein. Here's where it gets interesting. I typed in plittle@aol.com, only to find that there is no user in their records registered with that e-mail address. Hmph! I must have used a different e-mail address. I used to get broadband access via a third party, and use AOL's BYOA (bring your own access) plan. Perhaps I had used an e-mail address associated with that ISP.
   I tried entering a couple of e-mail addresses that I (to the best of my memory) had used back then, with no luck. Blogger still kept telling me that no account existed with those addresses. Not that I could have retrieved mail sent to those addresses, I was just curious. I was left with two possibilities. One: I had mis-remembered my old non-AOL e-mail address, or Two: the user ID I had typed in actually belongs to someone else, and my old registration from so many years ago had long been discarded.
   Not that any of this was important at all. It would be child's play to simply start a new account, with a new user ID and password, and go from there. But I was, as I have mentioned, curious. On their help pages, they have a section on login problems, and they say this:

If you signed up with an old email address that you no longer have access to, or if you made a typo in your email when registering, then you will not be able to use the login recovery functions. In this case, you'll need to write to us for help.

You'll notice that the words 'write to us' are in the form of a hyperlink.
   Now, a hyperlink made out of the words, 'write to us' might lead one to expect that link to pop up a compose e-mail window with the address already filled out. Or, one might think it would lead to a web form in which one could fill in one's e-mail address, and describe the problem one is having. The last place one might expect to be directed to, after having clicked on a link saying 'write to us' in the context of having a problem logging in to a website, is that website's login page.
   I kid you not. On the blogger.com website, there are several places where users are told, "if you have forgotten your user ID and/or password, click here." In every instance, the link provided takes one to a page asking for a user ID and password in order to log in. Am I crazy to think that there's something wrong with this picture?

4:00PM--edited to add: OK, so I'm a goof. I took a good look at the 'sign in' page blogger sends you to if you have a problem, and there is a link there labelled 'skip authentication' that allows you to access the help section without logging in. D'oh! Not all that intuitive, though (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it). But I have a new problem. I tried a different user ID, and that was accepted, too. So, now I have two valid user ID's that I do not know the password to, one or neither of which may, or may not belong to me. I think Karen's right. Starting over from scratch is the sensible thing to do here.

tags:Blogs,Blogging