Ask HN: What is the worst login experience you had on the Web? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the worst login experience you had on the Web?

2 pointsfdeage6 comments

I love Trello, and manage a lot of small personal projects on it. I pretty much never log out.

Now, as everyone on HN knows, Trello was bought by Atlassian not so long ago (2017?). So now the auth process is handled by Atlassian (makes sense I guess).

Recently, due to a browser cookies' spring cleaning, I had to log in to Trello again. The whole experience felt sluggish and poorly designed.

In short: I went to "trello.com/<project_id>", and saw a short, classic login form: "Log in to Trello: Enter email Enter password Log in"

Sweet. BUT: after inputing my email, the bottom half switched to "Login with Atlasssian" (thanks, AJAX). I reluctantly clicked, and was unsurprisingly redirected to "https://id.atlassian.com/login".

Ok, fine, I'll input my password. I click, and the screen goes blank for 5 secs. Only the "Please wait..." on the top left part of the screen convinces me that something is gonna happen somehow. trello.com? No, I was redirected to "https://auth.atlassian.com/login", which showed a page for some reason, but redirected me automatically 3 seconds later to trello.com.

Thinking that this was a tech company logging a user made me think of the horror stories that probably exist with banks, governments, etc.

So, what's your experience with a very bad, poorly designed login experience?

In my case, it's an inability to log in:

I picked up an EE (UK telecoms provider) SIM card after returning to Britain after many years abroad. Buying credits in a shop is a hassle - and hampered by my poor memory when shopping - so I decided to do it online. However, when I visited the EE site and tried to plug in my phone number and other details, I was rejected because my email address had already been registered. As it happens, I had had an EE subscription phone plan at some point before my travels. I can't remember what that phone number was, and I certainly no longer have the EE site credentials anywhere. It has not been possible for me to resolve this. Well, I could use another email address, but I've decided not to do so. There is probably an advantage in a telecom provider not having info such as name, physical address, email address etc.

Funny you mention a telecom provider, because the same happened to me in France: I wanted to switch plan on the same operator, but couldn't because I was redirected to the login screen again and again.

Worst is when different requirements are applied between desktop and mobile.

Most recently, Panda Express. I established the account on desktop with a relatively simplistic 5 character password. On mobile, I can't even log in because it considers anything less than 8 characters to automatically be void.

Dunkin donuts is another. I established the account on desktop with a '+' in the email address and loaded my gift cards there. On mobile, I cannot even login to use those cards' value.

[] Login with Google [] Login with Facebook

(no other options.) Admittedly the horrorshow that is the current Trello/Atlassian trainsmash is up there in the Top 3 or so.

Nice one. God, it makes me so sad that websites can get away with this behavior now. What website was it? Shiny new startup?

I've seen quite a few... can't remember specifics, since I just bounce at that point. But certainly common to Shiny New Startups!

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