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Comment by nappy-doo | Hacker News Reader

I have tried repeatedly to move my old account over, and it didn't work. No error code, just fails silently after the second step. Emails to MSFT have gotten responses, but no ROI has happened as a result. This is par for the course for MSFT accounts and Minecraft. They are terrible. MSFT has the WORST account management of any platform. Oh well, I guess I'll stop playing with my kids soon.

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If you think MS is bad, try Square Enix sometime. You get to bounce around between about 3 different terrible websites to scratch your nose. Some use email, some use username... it's just a disaster. Oh, and they use some ancient font on at least one of the sites that doesn't even support hinting/AA.

For a span of years, I would periodically (every month or two) manage to get Google in some weird state where it'd just redirect-loop me through a half-dozen domains forever when I tried to do anything. I'd have to delete cookies and start with a fresh session to fix it. It hasn't happened in a while, but I think that might mostly be because I interact with Google a lot less these days.

Crap like this is why people hate computers. How's some non-geek supposed to figure that out?

What’s the second step? I once had trouble transferring a domain between registrars and it turned out to be because I had “!!” at the end of my password which is something like “repeat last command” in some terminals and whatever backend process they were using used my plaintext password somewhere. I had to figure it out on my own and I only thought of it because I had recently ran into issues setting up a local MySQL instance with the same password. I changed my password with the registrar to fix it.

That's the holy grail of backend mistakes, right? Unescaped user input fed into a shell, and worse, that input is their password. How long ago was this?

2009. I couldn't believe how lucky I was to even think of it. I had never run into the issue using that password, which I used everywhere (wouldn't do that these days) except when I tried playing with MySQL on my local machine a few months prior. I think the issue was I couldn't log into the db as admin on the command line, even though it didn't have any trouble setting the password. I don't remember how I figured out that was the problem with MySQL though. I think it had set my password to [start of password]+[last command] and I was able to see that somewhere and deduce how something like that could possibly happen.

When I tried to transfer the domain, support was baffled about why their standard transfer processes was was failing just for my account. I think it went on for a few weeks but I wasn't in any hurry so I didn't bother them much. They kept asking me to try again a bunch, but nothing they changed ever worked. At some point the idea just hit me that the password was the same from that MySQL issue. By that time I had moved on to using a new password everywhere because of that issue, but had never switch it for this account. So I switched the password, tried the transfer again, and it finally worked! I told support what I changed and why I think it might have been causing an issue but they never did directly confirm that was the problem. I'm still pretty sure it was. After I changed the password, they sent me an email with the new password in it, naked as the day it was born.

I had the same problem, but just called MS Support, like they listed in the help section. I had to provide proof of purchase (which I luckily had moved from machine to machine since 2012). They sent me an e-mail with the log-in information.

Everything was smooth.

Did you try that instead of e-mailing?

I've heard back from emailing, but it's useless. They say, "take screen shots". Of WHAT? Of it saying, "it's failed"? There's no error code, nothing. As other posters in thread have said, we're a technical crowd (for me 30+ years in IT, and 15+ at FAANG) and we can't get this crap to work. I think it's WAI – they want us to repurchase.

(For the record, for me, it'll be like 10th time I've bought it, so it's working for MSFT. [The first time I bought it was 5$ to Notch's PP account.])

So record your screen.

It's a burden, but you're in it this far, to the point of telling us strangers about it ^.^

Take a screen recording of the page, with the devtools javascript console or network tab open. A technical crowd should know what's useful for troubleshooting :)

Feels ridiculous that you have to call them for something like this.

Yeah, probably, but that doesn't change the fact that I had to do it. I can want for one thing, but I have to live with the reality of the situation.

I hit an issue that sounds like this. There was a captcha URL that was getting blocked by my adblocker. Never ran into a thing like that with any other site. No error, no redirect, just silent failure.

I was migrating 5 accounts at the time, and it hit on the second or third so I was baffled for a bit.

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