Household charge website seems to be working better now, but it's not perfect yet

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Brendan Burgess

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I had suggested in this post that people should not bother to attempt to pay the charge until the website was working properly.

I have managed to pay it now without a hitch. Very simple. Very smooth.

I would recommend to people to pay it now and not leave it until the 31 March when the system is bound to be inundated.

Brendan
 
I have just registered and paid on behalf of a relative and the whole process took 8 minutes.

The only small problem was the captcha which took 2 goes.

Brendan
 
Thanks for the update, Brendan. I am going to register for our house and that of a relative of mine this week end. Hopefully my experience will be as smooth as yours. Will post if any issues.
 
hello Brendan, the captcha turned out to be awful. I lost count of how many times it took. At least 20, and it is not clear whether one has misread the words or whether the password or user ref. has a mistake. The whole process took an hour. (As regards the audio option, why was this recorded in a pub with a cassette player from the dear old 1970s? On top of that, the accent of the speaker seems to be from somewhere in Canada, just to make it even more uncertain what the person is saying.)
 
it is not clear whether one has misread the words or whether the password or user ref. has a mistake
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That is exactly the experience I had when I first tried it in early January.

It is better now, but obviously not good enough.

I don't understand the purpose of the captcha? Why would anyone bother setting up a computer to register falsely for the charge?
 
I paid last week with no issue except I did have to refresh the captcha twice ot three times but that was all.
 
It's not working for me

It keeps looping back to the captcha when I try to login.

My reference number was entered correctly, as was my password.

I even reset my password but it still kept on looping back to the captcha.

It's bad enough having to pay a bill but it's worse when the method of paying it doesn't cooperate.

I have emailed support .... we'll see what they have to say for themselves.

[broken link removed]


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I paid for an elderly relative today. Got the captcha wrong twice before I got in. It was painful. What is the purpose of the captcha?
 
Have to agree about the captcha. It's is very difficult to read and took me a few attempts. I come across this feature a lot on other sites but never had as much difficulty working out what to input. One of the words seems to be a 'real' word and the second part seems a jumble of letters making it much more difficult to read. I'm sure this will drive some folks crazy. Other than that the rest was grand.
 
"I would recommend to people to pay it now and not leave it until the 31 March when the system is bound to be inundated.

Brendan "


Do you not think most people are capable of making up their own minds about if and when they will pay this charge. If someone asks for advice re household charge that is the time to express your opinion. Meanwhile could you stop badgering the people who are well equipped to decide about their tax liabilities. It is beginning to look like there is an agenda here.
 
This thread deals with the mechanics of paying the Household Charge.

Posts which do not deal with the mechanics of paying will be deleted or moved.

aj
moderator
 
Just wanted to echo what earlier posters have said about the ease of using the website -

I registered and paid on line on Friday - all very smooth, bar the captcha. I felt my (forty-something) eyesight was deteriorating by the minute, and had to refresh it a few times before I saw a version I could decipher.

Clearly the powers-that-be are watching AAM (wise people!) as they've done some work on the website to rectify faults reported earlier. Maybe they'll refine the captcha as well?
 
ANORAKPHOBIA said:
"It is beginning to look like there is an agenda here.
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You are quite right. It's the exact same agenda as in this post

Don't bother trying to pay your charge yet - the site is not working properly.

That was put up to save people the hassle of dealing with a difficult site.

This thread was intended to show that it had improved.

Joe Duffy will be full of complaints on 31 March from people saying that the site crashed and they wanted to pay their household charge but couldn't. Save yourself the hassle - pay it before the rush.

Brendan
 
I just had my eyes lasered and have better than 20/20 vision and that capitcha was a nightmare.
 
maybe i was just lucky, but "my" captcha was fine, was done and dusted on the site in 5 minutes.
 
No issues here with the captcha either, was fine. I'm using a screen resolution of 2048*1152 so maybe on some resolutions it's quite hard to make out.
 
I got a reply from 'support':

"Thank you for your email.

We experienced a small number of issues with our website over the weekend. Unfortunately this coincided with scheduled maintenance resulting in a longer disruption than anticipated.

We apologise for any inconvenience"
 
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