I saw James Bach’s latest post and I remembered a similar situation that happened to me. It wasn’t so interesting as his, but the idea  was the same.

I created an account at Inmotionhosting.com  with username “testalways” and waited for activation. Which should have been almost immediately after the registration. After a while I called support and they told me my account was not activated indeed, because my username started with the string “test”.

They gave me another username that didn’t start with “test” and everything worked.

I have to add though, to be more specific, that the username you use for registration is not exactly the one you filled. For example I had for filling “testalways” an initial account like “testal234″ (which started with test though) that caused the trouble. So if I would have tested the application myself there, I would have looked to the entire path of account generation and activation.

Thumbs up for support though for helping there.

I know myself that is hard to simulate everything on a safe environment then deploy and hope everything is OK. So you need to do tests on the live platform. The risk is that some stuff can alter the wanted behavior.

In this case I think, with the backup of support, things were not costly. But you never know what impact these changes have. Maybe inability to activate an account causes a queue of inactive accounts till that ones is OK, depending on the design. Or other similar, unpredictable behaviors that   have a great impact.

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1. QA Hates You » Blog Archive » The Worst I Ever Got Was A Shower Caddy says:

   January 7, 2011 at 7:54 pm

   [...] an overcorrection, Eusebiu Blindu (aka testalways) found that his hosting provider blocks the keyword test in certain [...]

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