I have a registered oyster card with PAYG credit on it, but I don't use
auto top up, because I am a long way from any fixed validators.

Presumably the problem you have is receiving the initial auto top-up
instruction? For the benefit of the less well informed about Oyster, it
might be good to remind readers that the main perceived stopper with auto
top-up these days is getting that initial instruction on the card which
requires a planned journey to fixed validators (tubes, DLR, tram stops) as
after that you can auto top-up on buses. However it is now possible to
purchase an Oystercard online with auto top-up already enabled. So it isn't
quite the stopper it was. It just requires getting another Oyster card, and
if you don't want two using up the credit on the old one and getting the
deposit refunded.

same reason I have never bought PAYG online. Oystercard.com tells me that
people like me don't get access to our journey history online [1].

But in the past, before the special people started to be able to get their
journey history online,

From what I can make out:

'people like me' = not customers of Oyster Online
'special people' = customers of Oyster Online

I wouldn't actually have a huge issue with that in principle (but see
below). What I do certainly do have issue with is some of the other answers
in Oyster Help which are worded in such a way that they would allow you to
infer that having an Oyster Online account suffices without the need to
purchase anything from them.

there was a feature on
oystercard.com whereby anyone with a registered card, however they added
credit to it, could be *emailed* a PDF of their recent journey history. I
have such a PDF to prove this...

Does this facility still exist, or have they actually removed
functionality in the name of progress?

If it does then I can't find it either and I agree it seems wrong to remove
functionality in this way.

I should imagine that Oyster Online probably operates as a separate entity
(and I know it is actually Keith Prowse that run it) and if that was made
clear then I wouldn't have a great issue with treating their paying
customers differently to those who haven't bought anything from them yet.
However by the way Oyster Online is branded and marketed and blended into
the TfL site it is natural to infer that it is TfL's 'Oyster central' as it
were and it rather seems this is not the case at all.


G.