Challenge: we tried to register for the trial ;)

[Sonya*]

FYI, yesterday a friend of mine wanted to register for a free 30-days trial of Invision Community.

1. We have tried his working email @web.de and get "You are not allowed to use that email address on this site."
2. We have tried his alternative email @t-online.de and get "You are not allowed to use that email address on this site."
3. We then registered other emails with @gmx.de and @mail.de and get "You are not allowed to use that email address on this site."
4. Finally, we succeeded with @freenetmail.de 😓
5. The confirmation email from sales@invisionpower.com went straight into the spam folder.
6. We had to fill out the captcha multiple times. Every time before we get the message "You are not allowed to use that email address on this site." Another time for successful email confirmation and then another time for the account creation.
7. A form for account creation with three mandatory security questions and a full postal address looks huge.

To get a trial with your competitor, all we had to do is to enter the working email address (@web.de) and then confirm it. Then we get login URL and login credentials. No manual creation of the account was needed. No security questions, captchas, full postal address etc. The welcome email was delivered into inbox.

While I understand that you try to combat spam registration. The whole process to get the trial was tedious. My friend would have given up if I had not persisted proceeding and helped him. Just to inform you, that you do not make it easy to register for trials.

[Marc]

I have moved this to our feedback location for you 🙂 Thank you for letting us know your experience, and I will pass this along

 

[bernhara]

Same problem with the @orange.fr mail domain. 

[Chris027]

Just an FYI, I don't allow people to signup on my site with @t-online.de addresses either. The sole reason is that t-online.de has draconian policies about blocking mail from domains it doesn't like. They actually told me I had to post my physical home address on my website in order to allow their users to receive email from my domain. 

I just tell people, "You are not allowed to use that email address on this site."

[opentype]

Quote

… had to post my physical home address …

I’m pretty sure they didn’t phrase it like that. They probably just asked for a proper imprint with data about the legal representation, which is simply the law here in Germany (see German Telemedia Act) and not something “draconian” that T-Online made up because the don’t “like” certain domains as you phrased it. 

But that’s all beside the point anyway, which is that services like United Internet (GMX, Web.de) in Germany or Orange in France have a market share of over 30% in those countries, similar to Gmail in the United States. So blocking these service would be like blocking Gmail. 

[Chris027]

1 hour ago, opentype said:

I’m pretty sure they didn’t phrase it like that. They probably just asked for a proper imprint with data about the legal representation, which is simply the law here in Germany (see German Telemedia Act) and not something “draconian” that T-Online made up because the don’t “like” certain domains as you phrased it. 

But that’s all beside the point anyway, which is that services like United Internet (GMX, Web.de) in Germany or Orange in France have a market share of over 30% in those countries, similar to Gmail in the United States. So blocking these service would be like blocking Gmail. 

I have the emails. I couldn’t believe what they were telling me. I think it’s draconian to require a published physical address, in order to route email. 

I also know they don’t enforce it for every domain, thus my “certain domains” comment. 
 

Given that receiving email at one of these addresses is difficult, every member of my community who has an address at one of these addresses, also has one at a service that works much better. 

[Matt]

Thanks for the feedback. We do have robust spam management in place because a trial account is a full account which costs us a not insignificant amount of money. The trial is just for you and you have the option to convert it to a full account at the end of the trial. 

I'll see if we can tweak things a little though.