The Photobucket Saga

Posted by: bob on Tuesday December 13th 2011

Not to long ago Twitter started offering direct image uploads for tweets, and that service is powered by Photobucket. When you visit Photobucket to sign up and connect it to Twitter, it throws an error about an invalid zip code. The thing is there is no visible zip code field in the form. This struck me as being really silly considering I could not sign up on the site powering the site I am trying to use. Having just woke up, and still groggy as the allergy medicines had not kicked in I left a rather humorous and slightly insulting (intentional for the lulz) post on Twitter addressing the problem.

I am used to being ignored or brushed off on Twitter, but then a few hours later I got a reply from their help account:

So I see this, and I am thinking “it is such a simple problem and if you know about it, why do you need another ticket about it?” And I posed this question on IRC, where it was suggested I screw with form with Chrome and send them an invoice for my time. I did manage to get around the problem. Their form has (or maybe by the time you read this, had) a hidden input field named “zip” with a value of “N/A” and their registration app was choking on it. Forcing it visible and then putting in a real zip code allowed registration to pass through correctly.

I posted an updated screenshot, and a link to an invoice  for the time spent. I never actually expected to get paid, the invoice was [mostly] a joke. But the problem is simple enough it should not take a think tank to fix, and that was the point. The invoice stated the problem with the hidden field and the simplest solution which was to make the field not hidden so that a user could actually input a zip code.

Shortly after this I received a reply…

When I got that message I laughed, but I was wondering if the time was actually worth it. Would they actually use what I found? Was this a write off message? I know I did not actually fix their product, I merely pinpointed the answer that they suggested was eluding them. About ten minutes after that I received an interesting email which went along with this follow up…

So in the end that is my story of how being a groggy nuisance on Twitter may have gotten things done. I appreciate the gesture Photobucket made by upgrading my account to Pro, but what I appreciate more than that is that they actually followed up and may have appreciated my effort. They could have said they upgraded me for my troubles, not my help. We will see how long it takes them to implement a solution. So now it looks like I will be using Photobucket and seeing how that goes for a while. Cheers and Happy Holidays to the Photobucket people.