Possumblog

&!$^#

Sorry to be so brusque, but I noticed this article about Ancestry.com's posting of American military records that are free to view for a limited time (until this year's D-Day anniversary).

Being a fan of both researching family history and military history, I zipped over there and quickly found a link to my grandfather's WW1 draft card, clicked on it, and, well dern. You still have to register with them for the free look-see. Fine. Typed in my name and e-mail, clicked and got a note that someone was already using that e-mail address. Oh, yeahhhh.

I'd forgotten I had already signed up with them a couple of years back. Typed in what should have been my password.

No dice.

Grr.

Got them to send me my password, and the danged thing STILL WOULDN'T WORK!

Grr, grr, GRR!

Tried several more times, still couldn't come up with a combination that pleased the gatekeeper, and in frustration gave up and decided to redo everything. Used my work e-mail address, got a confirmation back, went and changed the inscrutable set of characters of the supplied username and password to something more easily rememberable, the computer then said that it was having a problem processing my new information, gave up and went BACK to the site and once more tried to get to that elusive draft card image. Used my newly renamed user name, hoping it would work, clicked, and the browser window shut down.

And now, it's a real mess and I get an error screen. I think the article caused more than just a few history buffs (and cheapskates) to overwhelm their servers.

Dern it all.

Y'know, maybe it's just me, but I would think that if I was going to unveil something like this, I'd have a pretty good idea that there might be several million people who'd want to take a look at it, and have some sort of plan for handling all that traffic. And even if I didn't have anything quite so spectacular, I still think I would update the way people access information on my site. And if I have registration, I think I would fix it to be relatively simple and not quite so frustrating.

Maybe it's just me.

UPDATE: Well, finally got back through to the military records--the long way--and clicked on the link to the image, got sent back to that login screen for freeloaders, signed in to the regular login with my new username and password, clicked it, and just as it was about to take me to the page, the browser window shut down again. In fairness, I think part of this is a problem with our security software here. Or maybe it's just me.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at May 24, 2007 10:56 AM