Getting in / Pair 13 of 41

An absence against a single character out of place

The form says it does not know the name you gave it. That is either a true statement about an account that does not exist or a true statement about a string that has one character wrong in it.

Why an absence and a typo present the same

A lookup is a match or it is nothing. The site takes the string you typed, goes looking for it, finds no row and says so. It has no notion of nearly. It will not tell you that something one character away exists, and it should not, since that would hand anybody a way to walk a name list.

From your chair the refusal reads as an accusation that the account never existed. It is not. It is a statement about the exact string you handed over, and strings are fragile in ways that eyes do not pick up.

An account that is not thereA

Nothing was ever stored under that name

A registration that stopped halfway, a name you meant to take and never confirmed, or a memory of registering somewhere that was not here. There is no row to find, and no amount of careful typing will produce one.

A name spelled differentlyB

The row exists and your string does not reach it

The account is sitting there. What you are typing differs from it by a character, a case, a separator or an invisible space that arrived with a paste. The site is answering honestly about the string it was given.

Where the lookup decides

Names on sites like these are usually stored exactly as they were chosen, and compared exactly. Some fold case and some do not, and the login form will never tell you which, since telling you would leak information about how the store is built.

The practical result is that you are being asked to reproduce a string from memory with no feedback and no partial credit. People are bad at this, and they are worse at it after a gap of a few months, which is exactly when they come back and find that the name they were sure of does not work.

A capital I, a lower case l and the digit 1 share a shape in a great many fonts.
The pair rn sits close enough to m that a name copied by eye can survive for months before it fails.
A nought and a capital O separate only by width, and some sites forbid one of the two for that reason alone.
An underscore that a font drops below the baseline reads as a gap rather than a character.
A trailing space picked up from a chat window travels with the paste and shows as nothing at all.
Case, where a name you always thought of as lower case was registered with one capital at the front.

What separates a missing account from a misspelled name

Read against the record, not against memory

Put the string you are typing beside the record you made when you registered and read them against each other one character at a time, out loud if it helps. Either they differ somewhere, which settles it, or you have no record at all, which settles it in the other direction.

Find whatever you wrote down when you registered. A password store entry counts, a note counts, a saved form entry counts.
Read your string and the record character by character rather than glancing at both.
Pay attention to the ends of the string, since spaces live there and are invisible.
No record anywhere is itself an answer. People who finished a registration nearly always left a trace of it.

Reading out loud sounds silly and it is the part that works. Eyes skim strings and match them on shape, which is precisely the failure mode that put you here. A voice has to commit to a character before it moves on.

The cheap mistake and the expensive one

If you read a spelling slip as a missing account: You register a second time. Now there are two accounts, the standing and history live on the one you cannot reach, any balance stays exactly where it is, and no operator will merge them for you. This is the expensive slip and it is not undoable.
If you read a missing account as a spelling slip: You spend an evening trying variants of a name that was never taken, and you feed the attempt counter while you do it. Irritating, and it delays you, but you can walk away from it with nothing lost.

The asymmetry is why registering again should be the last thing you do rather than the first. A second account is quick to make and permanent, and the thing it costs you is the thing that took longest to build. If money is sitting in the first one, the pairs under money are the relevant reading rather than this page.

What follows in each case

If the account is genuinely not there: Register once, write the name down at the moment you choose it, and store it wherever you keep the address rather than in your head.
If it is the spelling: Stop typing from memory. Take the string from the record, check both ends for spaces, and make a single attempt with it.

One more shape worth naming. If the name you are hunting for belongs to somebody else rather than to you, the same reasoning applies but the record you check against is different, and a name you cannot find is far more often a name written down wrong than a person who vanished. The rest of the entrance problems are gathered in getting in, and the wider set is at pairs.

Questions readers send about this pair

Are usernames case sensitive?

Sometimes, and the form will not say. Treat case as significant until you have proof otherwise, since assuming it does not matter is the assumption that costs you an extra account.

I am certain I registered. What now?

Certainty after a few months is worth less than a written record, which is the uncomfortable part. Look for the trace first. If there truly is none, the registration probably never completed, and those tend to fail quietly.