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Adam Kalsey

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ThinkFree -- making it hard to sign up

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1 Dec 2006

ThinkFree is an online office suite that promises one thing that others don’t—collaboration. I’m working on a set of Powerpoint slides with some other people and thought it would be nice to try an online tool instead of emailing the file around.

But they sure don’t make it easy to sign up. Trying from my Mac in Firefox 2, I filled out the signup screen and was greeted by a useless form error message. "Permission Denied"

signup error screenshot

No explanation of why. No suggestions how to fix it. Are they perhaps limiting the number of people who can sign up? Or did I make a mistake when completing the Captcha? There’s no way to know. They should read Simplified Form Errors.

The help files don’t mention the problem. But I notice in hte system requirements for OSX that Firefox 1.5 is required. I swap my user-agent string so the browser reports itself as Firefox 1.5 and try again. Still no dice.

Over to the Windows machine to sign up via IE7. This time it works. But the confirmation email that comes in is a multipart message with both text and HTML versions. Only the text version is blank, meaning my text-only email client can’t see it.

email confirmation screenshot

I’ve got to view the source of the HTML version to get the activation URL so I can start using the thing.

If it’s this hard to even sign up, how can it possibly be easy to use?

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