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Active.com still misleading
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Despite knowing all about active.com's shenanigans, I nearly filled the box out that would have me paying for the membership. I submitted my payment for a local race and got a window that showed my partial credit card number and a field asking me to confirm my email. It looked like part of the confirmation process but was really a sneaky way to accept the membership. I absolutely HATE using active.com and detest their shady business practices.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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I registered for a race this week and noticed the same thing. It took me a minute to figure out it wasn't really a confirmation page. I've defended Active here in the past but this is clearly a deliberate step taken to be more deceptive than the old method.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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Oh crap, I forgot all about this and already registered for a race. Any idea how to know if I accidentally signed up for their stupid membership?
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Re: Active.com still misleading [Dex675] [ In reply to ]
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when you get charged, call them. they actually have a option on their answering service to cancel your subscription and get the refund.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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Don't stress. Their problems are bigger than yours. They're on the ropes. They've been below $5/share for quite some time, so when they get delisted and relegated to penny stock BBs, the end will come fast. If there are any institutional investors left they will be required to get out.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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is it bad to admit that I signed up for it then registered for a whole lot of races then called them to cancel w/in 3 days. I think I saved over $100 and only paid $1.95 (which I was a bit annoyed about because I thought the 30 days was free...but oh well, I saw the nominal cost before I paid for it)
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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A mysterious charge of $64.95 just hit my credit card. I must have clicked the misleading trial membership box when I signed up for a local race. Of course I emailed them demanding a refund of my unauthorized membership. This is a shady business practice for sure. I wonder how many times this charge slips by an unaware consumer?
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Re: Active.com still misleading [ryan.lamb] [ In reply to ]
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ryan.lamb wrote:
when you get charged, call them. they actually have a option on their answering service to cancel your subscription and get the refund.
They are betting most people won't notice, of if they do they won't bother to call. Same business model as old AOL subscriptions that were impossible to cancel, or "free" trial versions of anything, ever.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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i signed up for a race and forgot to uncheck the box. ended up seeing this on my credit card, emailed them, told them I'm not happy and that they have misleading business practices, they got sort of upset for me calling them misleading but still refunded the membership. bottom line: misleading despite refund. they just hope you don't look at your credit card statements
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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As a race director I'm in my last two weeks of using active.com for my events. I hate having to answer people who fell into this trap, telling them how to contact them to get their money back, how to make insurance claims if they bought race insurance, and frustrated that a lot of people hit that membership button and fail to complete the race entry registration because it's so confusing. They show up thinking they have paid for the race and we have to tell them their receipt is for a membership, not a race entry!

I'm tired of having them market magazines and all kinds of other stuff during the registration process, and I'm especially annoyed that they have recently just raised their prices for processing. Since I absorb the cost of that for our athletes, and what you see is what your pay, it's especially annoying to find out after I've already announced all my prices that they are taking an even bigger cut!
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Re: Active.com still misleading [viktorv] [ In reply to ]
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viktorv wrote:
i signed up for a race and forgot to uncheck the box. ended up seeing this on my credit card, emailed them, told them I'm not happy and that they have misleading business practices, they got sort of upset for me calling them misleading but still refunded the membership. bottom line: misleading despite refund. they just hope you don't look at your credit card statements

I do not like active but have a hard time believing you accidently signed up for it. it is not automatically filled. you must actively sign up for it. there is an advert that says, save the processing fees and sign up for your free trial, then you have to actually click to read about it and sign up. Either you are missing a few bulbs or you are a liar and wanted to cheat active with the intention of throwing the selective outrage fit when you forgot to cancel after 30 days. I hope you are missing a few bulbs as that is preferable over being a lir and then posting how they are the shady ones.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [gotbitten] [ In reply to ]
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Woo, your post makes me happy that they are now doing random age group drug testing
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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I am glad I had the option of stamp and letter on my last event so I could avoid having to give money to these a-holes....saved $6
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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Since they're a California company (San Diego) more people need to send letters to Kamala Harris, the State's AG. They've already had to settle w/ the Iowa AG for Stealth Enrollments. You know California would loooooove to go after these guys for their scam-ish ways, if they aren't already working on it. It can't be that hard to process online payments, after all Pizza Hut does it. Such a rip off. Check out the article.



http://www.outsideonline.com/...me-race-registration
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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After taking my registration money for a race, and also insurance money, they basically gave my the run-around and nothing when I told them a month out that I would not be able to start. "You need to talk to Allianz Insurance"

Then a month after they reached out to me to see if they could use one of my pics for a Tim Reed interview on active.com.

Ha ha, yeah right.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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People are just too giddy and high when they sign up and happily click "yes" boxes.
Pop-ups by law clearly state what you are signing up for.
Reading comprehension and ability to understanding context is brain power.

When in doubt, just leave it out.....
Last edited by: windschatten: Nov 22, 15 22:35
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Re: Active.com still misleading [pennib] [ In reply to ]
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Glad to see there's at least one RD paying attention to this. The majority of these companies base their business models on ticketmaster, and hope that even thou they screw competitors, if they're nice to the RD they can keep the biz.

Athletepath and webscorer are the lowest cost and most transparent IME, and therefore the best choices. How active is still in business is beyond me.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [windschatten] [ In reply to ]
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People are just too giddy and high when they sign up and happily click "yes" boxes.

Active may be following the letter of the law, but their practices are still deceptive. Read my original post and witness how many people have accidentally signed up. My guess is most of us are well educated and have sufficient reading skills (I teach college writing classes), yet I still found it confusing. The only reason Active is still around is because they are the biggest sign-up company. But you know what, AOL.com and MySpace were once the industry leaders too.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [trifan] [ In reply to ]
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active is what it is. however, they do reimburse you 65$ per year (which takes care of membership cost) once you submit it.
it works if you race over 4 times a year. I have done it with no issues.
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Re: Active.com still misleading [OldnFat] [ In reply to ]
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Glad to see there's at least one RD paying attention to this. The majority of these companies base their business models on ticketmaster, and hope that even thou they screw competitors, if they're nice to the RD they can keep the biz.

It's important to note here that the customer/client of Active, or any online reg system is the Race Director - so that's where complaints from participants need to go if you are not happy with the registration system or service that the race is supplying - just like you would if there were not enough porta-potties, or they ran out of bananas etc . .

Now, I sold the services of a competitor to Active for a number of years, and what I found astounding was that, despite all this kind of thing that went on ( and the service supplier that I represented did none of that), most RD's that I was in contact with, and I spoke to hundreds of triathlon, running and cycling event RD's all across North America, they were "fine" with Active. I don't know if this spoke more of what Active was doing, or the lack of sophistication of the Race Directors - I'm just sighting my experiences of working in the trenches of this business for a few years.

In addition to this opt-in-opt-out stuff, Active also, directly and indirectly corrupted the brand of an event, and the brands of the events sponsors(they were more into promoting Active's brand than the events brand). They would also take an events data and then monetize that data for their own interest. This spoke directly to that lack of sophistication of many RD's. That's Business-101 stuff - You NEVER just give away your brand/logo and your data! But as noted, many race directors were, in their own words, "fine" with Active!


Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog
Last edited by: Fleck: Nov 24, 15 15:24
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Re: Active.com still misleading [Herbert] [ In reply to ]
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After taking my registration money for a race, and also insurance money, they basically gave my the run-around and nothing when I told them a month out that I would not be able to start. "You need to talk to Allianz Insurance"


Herbert,

I can't get into more details, right now, but there is a potential game-changing solution waiting in the wings to launch, that will make this whole process a lot easier and more appealing for all players!


Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog
Last edited by: Fleck: Nov 24, 15 15:19
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Re: Active.com still misleading [Herbert] [ In reply to ]
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Herbert wrote:
After taking my registration money for a race, and also insurance money, they basically gave my the run-around and nothing when I told them a month out that I would not be able to start. "You need to talk to Allianz Insurance"

Then a month after they reached out to me to see if they could use one of my pics for a Tim Reed interview on active.com.

Ha ha, yeah right.


You should have said, "You need to talk to GFY Productions."
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Re: Active.com still misleading [Charles De Mar] [ In reply to ]
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Charles De Mar wrote:
Since they're a California company (San Diego) more people need to send letters to Kamala Harris, the State's AG. They've already had to settle w/ the Iowa AG for Stealth Enrollments. You know California would loooooove to go after these guys for their scam-ish ways, if they aren't already working on it. It can't be that hard to process online payments, after all Pizza Hut does it. Such a rip off. Check out the article.

http://www.outsideonline.com/...me-race-registration


Not sure where they are currently incorporated, but Active.com started moving the headquarters to Dallas last year. New owners Vista Equity Partners took a multi-millon dollar "bribe" from the Texas Enterprise Fund to move

http://www.activenetwork.com/...-global-headquarters
Last edited by: markg: Nov 25, 15 8:56
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Re: Active.com still misleading [Fleck] [ In reply to ]
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Yes! That is exactly correct. The brand becomes Active.com not the race.

The one downside to not using them I keep hearing is their "huge" marketing reach but I'm not so sure about that anymore. Using their marketing tools is pretty expensive and not really returning the results I would hope to see.

Also, you are spot on regarding the use of race data to build this "big data" activity cloud. Unless the RD is willing to give up a percentage of their revenue they can't get access to this data in any meaningful way. I mean really...the RDs and all of their clients helped build this data and they can't have it?
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