I wanted to complain about a bad GUI design in the web ChatGPT interface, but I ran into a rat’s nest of problems figuring out how to do it, and I’ve been temporarily locked out of my OA account, so I’m going to post here in the hopes someone at OA will see it.
Problems:
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6614161-how-can-i-contact-support states:
If you already have an account, simply login and use the “Help” button to start a conversation.
This is false. There is no ‘conversation’ link in the ‘?’ help button in a logged-in account. There is only a link to help.openai.com/ documents (which is ironically telling you this).
If you don’t have an account or can’t login, you can still reach us by selecting the chat bubble icon in the bottom right of help.openai.com.
This is false, because the chat bubble icon on help.openai.com simply tells you that “You can search our knowledge base for help. If you need further support (i.e. billing issues) please login to your account and start a new conversation.”
So you cannot ‘still reach us by selecting the chat bubble’.
(Further, this implies that a regular ChatGPT user cannot contact support without registering an entire new account…? That seems bad.)
I am having difficulties logging in to my API account (which, confusingly, is completely different from the ChatGPT account or this forum account?), which may or may not be related to attempting to set up 2FA only to realize that the 2FA doesn’t support dongles like Yubikey (which is bad, please support better 2FA) and abandoning the attempt (which would be a very serious bug if true), and the error message unhelpfully says:
We ran into an issue while authenticating you. If this issue persists, please contact us through our help center at https://help.openai.com.
This is unhelpful because it gives me no idea what is going wrong and whether it is a transient issue, related to the 2FA, or what.
Further, the advice it gives is always useless, because you cannot contact anyone about authentication issues… because help.openai.com’s help center requires you to be logged in to contact support!
So broadly, all the docs need to be updated to either indicate that there is no supported way to contact support outside a logged-in API-account, or logged-out access to support needs to be re-enabled.
Anyway, while I’m at it, my original complaint was about the web ChatGPT interface presentation of binary toggles. Right now, ‘Search’ and ‘Deep research’ are presented as round lozenges containing text. They look like informational labels. They do not look like any kind of binary on/off toggles or radiobox or check which would enable/disable a feature.
I only just today realized that is what they do today, months after they first showed up, because I assumed they indicated what features were active, and it wasn’t until I saw a tweet complaining about this that I finally tried clicking on them and realized they were the web ChatGPT GUI reinventing a wheel badly.
It doesn’t help that they default to ‘off’, too, so it’s not like I would suddenly notice my standard ChatGPT LLM gaining new capabilities which I could associate with the lit-up new lozenge.
I think the presentation of optional on/off features could be improved.