Betalogue

This is a constant annoyance and something that Apple does not appear to be aware of.

I am a registered user of the Apple Support Communities (formerly Apple Discussions) web site. Apple’s site is designed (presumably for technical reasons) so that it does not keep you logged in for very long. This means that you have to sign in on a regular basis if you want to use the site as a registered user.

I have configured things so that I get an e-mail notification each time someone contributes to a discussion thread that I have contributed to. The e-mail notifications work fine. They contain the text of the latest contribution, and the following footer:

To me, this clearly indicates that I should be able to

1. go to the message in the thread in question, which, unless I am currently logged in, will show me the discussion thread as it appears to an anonymous visitor to the web site
2. click on the “Sign In” link that appears at the top of the page:
   
3. sign in and be taken back to the message in question in the discussion thread so that I can reply to it

Yet in my experience, this is not what happens. When I click on the “Sign In” link, I am taken to a sign-in page. The form is filled out automatically for me by Safari, so I just click on the button to sign in. And then, the site takes me back to the… home page of the Apple Support Communities.

This is utterly stupid and useless. The site should be smart enough to remember which page I was on when I initiated the signing-in procedure, and take me back there once I am signed in. And it directly contradicts the underlying message of “ease of use” that the footer of the e-mail notification contains. Having to go back manually (via the “History” menu) to the page containing the message that I want to reply to is totally unintuitive.

As far as I can tell, this problem has been going on for years, and the footer in the e-mail notifications suggests that Apple is not even aware of it.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, October 31st, 2012 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.