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Hoops

In my quest to organize my life, I’m going through some old accounts and closing them down. As I traveled through life I made a spreadsheet of all the accounts I had signed up for: site name, account name and password.

I may have missed one or two but it’s a pretty complete list. Don’t worry, the accounts I’m shutting down are not ones I use frequently. In fact, in shutting some of them down I found out the site had closed my account due to inactivity.

I also found out that some of the sites no longer exist or had been transferred (bought out?) by another site.

Okay, so the process is simple, right? I log in with my username and password and then close my account, cool? If that were only true. About half of the time I ended up using the “forgot my account” link because it said I was using the wrong password. In my compendium of passwords I have the password as “assmunch” for the site. I hit the link and it sends the account name and password to my e-mail account (a real security breach, but that’s another story). Hey! What do you know, my password is “assmunch”. I try to log in again and it works. Huh.

My only thought here is that the account needed to be reactivated and the process of sending me the password woke up the account.

Of course, all sites have a totally different way to close an account. Some are hard to find, some are easy. Most have the “are you really sure?” guilt trip before actually closing. All of them seem to have the “You realize this is PERMANENT, right?” clause.

Then it becomes the issue of what they call it: “Close your account”, “Hide your profile” or “Resign your information”.

Once you find out HOW to close the account, it then becomes an issue of the number of steps it takes to remove yourself. The highest I counted was 8, which is totally ridiculous. Part of the process is that they send an e-mail to your account and you have to click on a link to confirm it.

There needs to be some sort of Internet law that states “shutting down an account should not take an act of Congress to complete”. I think there should be a link on your primary page (once you log in) that allows you to close your account. If your account is connected to a lot of online services, I’m okay with getting a confirmation e-mail that tells you of all the services that will be closing down. Google, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts can be used for several different online services and should probably come with a special warning if you’ve signed up for these services. Other than sites like these, it should be dead simple.

The opposite is probably also true: signing up for an account should require as little time as possible. Once you’re signed in you can fill in all the details, but to get the original account should take the least amount of information about you as possible.

As long as I’m at it, I’ll also add that sites where you have to pay for a subscription should also include a time period that is free. Most of the big ones (and good ones) do include this, but not all.

You can hamper it any way you want. If it’s a video-downloading site, make it so they can’t download while using the free trial. The person should be using the time to get comfortable with the interface and see what the site has to offer.

Once the free trial is over, though, you’ve got to jump through those hoops to sign up for an account.

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