"Quicken's Online service is unavailable at this time." Should be changed.

Chris_QPW

This message isn't correct the vast majority of time.

The full message is

"Quicken's Online service is unavailable at this time. Please wait at least ten minutes, then try again. We apologize for the inconvenience." 

But of all the reported instances of this I have yet to find anyone that has actually encountered at situation where the Quicken Oline services are actually offline.

The real problem is that somehow Quicken loses the "login information" needed to contact the Quicken services. So, the message should reflect this.

In my case, I was trying something that required me to log in with an expired subscription license. This in turn messed up the login for the main Quicken data file. It was easily fixed by logging out and back in (and I knew it would), but if I was normal user trying to follow what the message suggested all I would have gotten is frustration.

Rocket J Squirrel

See release notes for R58.9.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20447262#Comment_20447262

Chris_QPW

I saw it and I commend them for trying to fix the cause of people’s problems, so that they won’t get into that error condition in the first place, but that doesn’t fix the fact the message is incorrectly reporting what the actual issue is.

Note that I’m on R58.9 and I encountered this error message. And the “corrective action” recommended is wrong. Also note I have pointed this out in the past a few times, but this is the first time I have made it an official suggestion.

It has almost got to the point that it is FAQ that if the user encounters this message they should log out and back in. So, that is the message they should be posting, or at least mentioning both possibilities.

Rocket J Squirrel

Are you saying that the R58.9 release notes are wrong and that the message is still "wait 10 minutes"?

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20448152#Comment_20448152

I think you are misunderstanding what the release notes said/what they did. They didn't change the message. They are saying that instead of that message the user should now get a login prompt.

The proper result should have been a sign-in prompt.

So, in other words, they believe that they found the actual cause of the problem that people were having and for that situation they changed the code to prompt for the login. If they actually caught all cases of this kind of problem, and still Quicken couldn't contact the server then the message would probably be right. But I have proved that they haven't caught all cases, and I believe from the start the message should have included both possibilities as to the cause/workaround.

Chris_QPW

As I look at this exchange, I realize that now that they have covered some of the use cases, it is even less likely that they will change the message.

But it also dawns on me that they didn't really fix the original problem for the use cases that they did find. The real fix would have been to find why the login information is getting trashed and prevent that. Instead, the fix is "detect it got trashed in this case and force the user to login again."

Rocket J Squirrel

Hmm Ok, I definitely read it as meaning they simply changed the message.