Inspired by the nearby thread by the guy who wants to know how to set his privacy settings, I took a look at my own profile and decided to update my private e-mail address.
Immediately upon doing so, I got a message on the screen that stayed there for about 5 seconds and disappeared. I only had a chance to read the first few words. They were something to the effect:
“Because you’ve changed your e-mail address, you . . .”
I then found myself locked out of a lot of stuff – couldn’t see certain of my own profile pages, and couldn’t make a new post in other threads. The message was a generic “You don’t have permission to access that page . . .”
Because I never had time to read the message I got when I changed my e-mail address, it took me a while to figure out what I had just done to myself, and what to do about it. Messages like that really need to stay on-screen more than 5 seconds.
If the content of the message is “…you will be unable to make new posts for 12 hours”, or something similarly important, it shouldn’t be on a timer at all: It should remain up until the user actively dismisses it.
Because you needed to log in to your email account and verify that you really did want to change your email to that account. This is standard behavior on any website. If you change the email associated with your account, your next step needs to be log into your email and complete the verification process, not continue noodling around the site.
Canadjun is right – my complaint is that I didn’t have time to read what the message said, nor even enough time to consider that I ought to highlight it and press Control-V (which wouldn’t have helped me nor Inner Stickler anyway; I think you meant Control-C). Why would I have even expected in the first place, right from the start, that the message would vanish so quickly in a puff of smoke?
Related thought: Why not also send an e-mail to the old e-mail address too? (Maybe it did; I didn’t look there.) When I tell my financial institutions of a new mailing address, they always send a written notice to the old address as well as the new address.
[rant]In contrast, the irresponsible, negligent and idiotic Department of Motor Vehicles didn’t send me any notices to any addresses, when they changed my vehicle registration address based in erroneous information from some third party (I think the USPostal Service).[/rant]
(I am in the midst of writing some add-on modules for an app that I support, which does extensive error-checking and displaying of messages. I carefully consider whether messages should be timed or should simply sit and wait until someone sees them – largely depending on whether I expect a user will be running the module interactively, or whether it will be running unattended after-hours. In the latter case, errors should be written to a log file.)