jetpack-for-wordpressHere’s the puzzle of the day. Why isn’t WordPress.com’s password system working for TeleRead?

I doubt that evildoers are at work. I’ve had PW issues with WordPress.com in the past. At any rate, the upshot is that in the wake of a Jetpack upgrade, our site is missing features such as social media sharing icons.

Alas, I apparently need the PW to deal with the upgrade, at least the way TeleRead is set up now. That means going through the prove-you’re-yourself routine, which in this case is a lot more complex than Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Jetpack, should have made it

Has anyone else been through WordPress.com identity torture? And isn’t it time for Automattic to come up with a more human-friendly system? I’d even pay for decent telephone support for this and other issues. Yes, I’ve searched through my PayPal transactions in vain to try to placate the bots behind the PW recovery forms for WordPress.com. I’ll see about other means. But it’s a real, real hassle.

The issues at Automattic are the opposite of TracFone’s. The phone company is too dependent on stupid people like the TracFone Guy from Hell . Automattic, by contrast, is too form fixated—too eager to disintermediate away the human race. Oh, well, I guess the company name serves as a fair warning. Google, of course, at least in regard to regular Gmail (not the one associated with the apps-for-work service), is similarly sadistic.

Hey, I love WordPress overall, and Automaticc has many positive attributes. But a usable PW system isn’t one of them.

Details: The icons will return only to the pages with posts, not to the home page. TeleRead loads noticeably faster without the icons there. Also of interest might be the fact that we’re on our own virtual private server, as opposed to WordPress.com. But Automattic, thanks to those pesky upgrades, makes us more dependent than ever on the mothership. Here we all gripe about damage if DRM-tainted bookstores go out of business. What if something unexpected happens to Automattic?

Update: The Jetpack features are working again. Contrary to my expectations, WordPress.com does not tie Jetpack installations within specific blogs to specific accounts. I created a new account at Nate’s suggestion. That said, as I noted in a comment to Nate, this is out of character for Automattic, which seems so eager to complicate PW recovery.

Update #2: Actually not everything is working. The VaultPress account is, surprise of surprise, tied to a specific email / PW combo. I want my old account back! I’m also wondering if the subscribe-to-blog and subscribe-to-comments features are working the way they should.

Update #3: The old account is finally back, thanks to a helpful human at Automattic. I just wish there were more of them to augment the forms so response time would be shorter.

2 COMMENTS

  1. David, I’ve never had this problem. The worst I’ve had to deal with was simply logging in again with the stored password and username.

    You’re not hosted by Automattic, are you? If that’s the case then are you sure you need a specific wordpress.com account or will any WP account do?

    As I understand it, JP needs to be tied to a WP account – any WP account will do. Couldn’t you set up a new account and use that while you regain access to your WP account?

  2. @Nate: Prob solved, thanks. Given how horrible the WP PW system can be, I was thinking that the specific account was almost surely tied to the specific blog for Jetpack purposes. Not the case. I created a new account. And now the icons are back. Of course, now the question is: Why does WordPress have all these complicated recovery procedures when, at least in a case like mine, a new account will do the trick? This was why I assumed that in character, Automattic would make things difficult and tie specific PWs to specific Jetpacks. So happy to be wrong. OK, now you can enjoy the comment alerts you emailed me about (their being AWOL). David

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