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Hello call center agent, I found a bug in your website

The other night the wife was baby sitting for some friends of ours. The kid went to sleep and she turned on Apple TV and started watching Ted Lasso to see what all the hype was. After half a dozen episodes she was hooked and talked me into getting the service for a month so that we could watch the rest of the season (also I kind of want to see how badly Foundation ruins Asimov's masterpiece). So tonight she installs the app on our TV and it turns out Samsung gives you 3 months free of Apple TV. 3D barcode, sign up for an Apple account, give them my CC info and Bob's your uncle...

Except that when I try to sign into my account it says I need to go to the AppleID website and complete my registration. I log into the site and it starts me off on the other part of the registration process that was missed. Security questions, acknowledge the security policy. Oddly, the continue button on the last page isn't working on my phone. So I load it up on my laptop and after another round of 2FA and reentering my security questions and acknowledging the security policy the button still doesn't work. F12 to the developer tools and I see I'm getting a 500 on the POST submitting my data. At the bottom the page it says if you have any issues call 1-800-MY-APPLE. So I call.

Press 1, Press 3, Listen to crappy on hold music for 15 minutes Finally a real person. Hello call center agent, I found a bug in your website. No, I can't log in, it just sends me to the site to complete my registration. Yes I've tried iCloud.com that doesn't work either. Yeah I created the account tonight. No I don't own any Apple products. Because I was signing up for AppleTV. Nope, no MacBook or iPhone. Sure I'll wait while you get a Level 2 Support Team Member.

I wonder if anyone else ever calls the support line when they find a bug in a web service. I know I've fixed bugs before that originated from reports from the call center but they never had detailed steps of the process. I wanted to give the call center all the info so they could file a report that the developers might actually use, but sadly it sounded like I was just some crazy person trying to tech "mansplain" the situation. I would have killed to have a ticket come in from the call center to have these types of details.

So if anyone out there reading this works at Apple doing their web services...I think the issue is that the account registration option at activate.apple.com doesn't generate a valid account. The POST at the end of following the steps to validate my account ends in a 500.

$ published: 2022-10-02 00:20 $

$ tags: rant $

-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2022-10-02

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