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PC Magazine Gripes PC Magazine's web site is pcmag.com

Subscribing

May 17, 2005. I ordered a new subscription from pcmag.com. $50 for 2 years. When entering your address, there is no field for an apartment number. Not everyone lives in a house. Making this worse, the maximum size of the address field is way too small to allow a full address and an apartment number. 

April 11, 2005. The magazine sent me a postcard with an automatic renewal notice. I don't recall asking to have my subscription automatically renewed. 

The price for the renewal was $39.97 for 25 issues. How many issues are there a year? It doesn't say. Could it not say because they don't want you to know? Perhaps they are hoping you will assume it is for 2 years? 

Why am I cynical? If you go to www.pcmag.com and click on the "subscribe now" link in the top left corner, you are offered 25 issues for $25. Wow, $15 a year cheaper. Or is it a year? This page too, doesn't say how many issues there are per year. But it did offer a revelation, I hadn't asked for automatic renewal! The bottom of the zdmcirc.com web page said:  

Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless you instruct us otherwise. We will notify and bill you at the discounted renewal rate then in effect prior to each new subscription term.

The "discounted renewal rate" refers to a discount off the cover price. This means nothing as all subscriptions offer that. Its like saying that a new car comes with tires. They say this because they can't compare the automatic renewal rate to any other subscription rates because it is the highest. 

To save $15 a year, I'd rather stop my current subscription and start a new one. The postcard says for "service questions" to go to service.pcmag.com. I do, and enter my name, address, city, state and zip code. The web site can't find my records. They make money on the automatic renewal, so you can't expect them to make it easy to stop it. It turns out I had to enter my address exactly as they had it on file. No "street" for my street, it had to be "st". No "east" for my address, it had to be "e". No instructions to do this either. 

Once in, I went to renew my subscription just to see how much it would be. The neodata.com (who?) web site offered 22 issues for $34.97 and they said that was a year. It also said this: 

Your subscription will continue for as long as you wish, without interruption at guaranteed savings off the cover price, unless you instruct us otherwise.

Here they are a bit more direct saying the discount is compared to the cover price. 

In the Marketing Options section, you can tell Neodata/PC magazine not to automatically renew your subscription. I did.  

Without trying I got three different rates: 

• 22 issues for $34.97   $1.59 per issue 
• 25 issues for $39.97   $1.60 per issue 
• 25 issues for $25       $1.00 per issue

April 12, 2005. I emailed PC magazine asking how many issues they published per hear. The reply, from "AB" of Neodata.com was: 

We usually publish magazine 24 times per year.

Forums 

April 6, 2005. I tried to make a comment in the forums on the PC Magazine web site. No luck. Doing so requires a userid and password. 

I had a userid/password for pcmag.com but it was rejected as being invalid. Perhaps it was old, I'm not sure. The gripe is that the web site does not say if the problem is the userid or the password. When it rejects your logon, there is no offer to email the password. There is such an offer, but it is on the initial logon page, not the error message page (where you need it). 

The error message however, did say something about a userid for any Ziff Davis property. So I next tried a userid/password that I had for extremetech.com. This resulted in a web site error: 

If you have reached this page, there has been an error. Please contact to report this problem.

Please contact who to report the problem? It doesn't say. A bug in the error message, in addition to the initial problem that caused it to be issued in the first place. You can't make this stuff up. The URL of the error page was discuss.pcmag.com/n/main.asp?webtag=pcmag&nav=start&msg=48336

I thought of setting up a new userid/password, but the form asks for a ton of information. 

It was suggested this might be a cookie related problem. Later, I deleted the cookies for www.pcmag.com and tried it again. This time it worked. 

The web pages on pcmag.com are way too long. They are chock full of ads and continue vertically forever. An expert on UI design once wrote an article about how bad the web page design at pcmag.com was, but that was before I made this web page and I can't recall where I saw it. 

FYI: It seems that Wired magazine plays tricks to get people to renew their subscriptions. Wired subscriber gets a jolt by David Lazarus San Francisco Chronicle. July 8, 2005.