More Adobe Woes

[Mike Farley]

Last night I was presenting at another camera club and during the break I needed to run Photoshop CC on my laptop to answer a question from someone in the audience. There was no WiFi available and what I got was a message telling me that it could not go online to check the validity of my subscription. Trying again this morning when I did have an Internet connetion, the message I received was that my subscription had expired. Checking my account status on the Adobe website confirms that my subscription is active and up to date. Creative Cloud is only installed on two machines and I was able to update Photoshop CC four days ago on the affected PC, so I am bewildered as to what is happening.

I would post screenshots, but I need to blur out some personal information first and would use Photoshop for this purpose, eccept I can't.

This really is not acceptable service from Adobe. It seems that I need to have an older version of Photoshop installed as well as CC to guard against Adobe revoking my subscription licence even when I have paid.

[Mike Farley]

UPDATE

Now here's an odd thing. The "Subscription Expired" message advises retrying in 15 minutes, so I closed the message and waited before making further attempts, all with the same result. The last time, just after I started this thread, I clicked on the "Try Again" button in the message and then it all worked. What the heck is going on, Adobe? Why will you not allow me to use my officially licenced software when I want without going through all this rigamorole?

[davidc]

What day does your subscription expire on? I've had this before when taking the laptop offline but I've also taken it offline tons of times and not seen this - I think it's because the terms of our agreement mean it needs to connect to adobe "a minimum of once a month" to verify your subscription. I suspect it could this be bad luck/bad timing and if you tried going offline again it'd be fine.

If not, and you are requested to go online every time you start it, I'd call adobe.

One thing I often do when moving the laptop about is to launch photoshop while online then put it into sleep mode - this means it's launched while connected to the internet then because I haven't closed PS, just sent it to sleep, when I relaunch there's no problem. Your battery will last a surprising amount of time in sleep mode.

[Mike Farley]

My subscription is due for renewal on 2 April, so a message which tells me that it has expired is completely erroneous. I had also been online with the laptop three days earlier when I installed the Photoshop 14.2.1 update. You know, the one they had to release in a bit of a hurry to correct the issues introduced with 14.2.

I do not have time at the moment, but later on I'll post screen shots on this thread.

[davidc]

I think the timer that checks if your subs are paid doesn't reset when you go online - as in it's a fixed date (not even your payment date either) and so if you launch PS after that date has passed but are online, it blocks you.

I'll try to dig out the article I read about how it works.

[Mike Farley]

Whilst I have no objections in principle to Adobe migrating to a subscription model, provided its honours it pledge not to increase the cost of the Photography Program to owners of perpetual Photoshop CS licences, it has not exactly handled the move to Creative Cloud in a manner that inspires confidence. First there was the hack, when it turned out that Adobe had failed to implement industrial strength security measures, and now this.

As it happens, the laptop had been online earlier in the day, so why had it not checked the licence details then? And when it next went online this morning, why did it not check my credentials rather than give an inaccurate message about my subscription having lapsed? As I have said before, by moving to software leasing, Adobe has turned itself into a service company but failed to understand what that entails. It hardly inspires confidence.