Andrew Heenan wrote:

"tim....." wrote :

Assuming you are referring to the bit that you left, he is saying
that it is only possible to "initiate" your top up by visiting a
tube station and actually making a TUBE journey, something which not
everybody will want to do.

If you don't want to travel, why, for God's sake, would you want to
top-up your oyster, auto, manually or any other way?
It simply does not make sense.

Who said anything about not wanting to travel? Just about not wanting
to travel by Underground. Remember that this whole sub thread was
started by someone pointing out the difficulty of recharging Oyster for
buses when you don't live near an Underground station.

And now that the *******s at TfL have abolished Saver tickets, a lot of
us are being forced to buy Oyster just for bus journeys. Despite the
fact that, as you point out, Oyster was primarilly designed with
Underground users, not bus users, in mind.

On Nov 24, 8:38*am, Roland Perry wrote:
In message
, at
15:00:59 on Sun, 23 Nov 2008, MIG
remarked:

he is saying that it is only possible to "initiate" your top up by
visiting a tube station and actually making a TUBE journey, something
which not everybody will want to do.

pedant Or a DLR journey /pedant

Actually not. *When I was offered a £4 refund (see my reply to Mr
Thant) I was told that I had to nominate a station. *I could fairly
easily reach a number of DLR stations, but not an LU station. *But I
was told that it had to be an LU station.

I'm virtually certain that when I tried to convert my card to auto-topup
the station I nominated was a DLR one.

nb: Converting to auto-topup might be different to getting a refund.
--
Roland Perry

I suppose it could be a DLR journey if it was Bank, Stratford, Canning
Town, West Ham ... But if refunds and auto top-up are affected by the
same issues, it seems to have to be a barrier rather than office or
free-standing pad.

On Nov 24, 8:34*am, Roland Perry wrote:
In message
, at
14:43:22 on Sun, 23 Nov 2008, MIG
remarked:

It's about as conceivable as it being impossible for refunds or auto
top-ups to be trigged by anything other than making a journey on LU.

Are you under the misapprehension that all top-ups need a LU trip to
trigger them?

No.

All that's required is one such trip to convert a card
into an auto-topup card.

The reason for doing it at a particular station could be in order to get
you on CCTV at a known place, as an anti-fraud measure. Imagine someone
stole your credit card details, then set up an auto-topup onto their
Oyster from your account.

Doing it at a ticket office or ticket machine at the station would be
at least as effective at achieving that though.

Not that I intend to do it, I am just perplexed at the TfL attitude of
"that's the way it is" when the system could obviously be made more
convenient with a minor change.

In message
, at
01:05:31 on Mon, 24 Nov 2008, MIG
remarked:
The reason for doing it at a particular station could be in order to get
you on CCTV at a known place, as an anti-fraud measure. Imagine someone
stole your credit card details, then set up an auto-topup onto their
Oyster from your account.

Doing it at a ticket office or ticket machine at the station would be
at least as effective at achieving that though.

It would. I have to admit that prior to this thread I didn't realise you
actually had to use the gates, rather than a ticket machine, at the
nominated station.
--
Roland Perry

"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 19:28:06 on Sun, 23 Nov
2008, tim..... remarked:
he is saying that it is only possible to "initiate" your top up by
visiting a tube station and actually making a TUBE journey, something
which not everybody will want to do.

pedant Or a DLR journey /pedant

strong-pedant Or a Tram or London Overground journey /strong-pedant

regards

Stephen


But what's to stop you touching straight back out, then getting the ticket
office to cancel out the pair of transactions?
--
Roland Perry

"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 22:22:45 on Sun,
23 Nov 2008, Stephen Osborn
remarked:
he is saying that it is only possible to "initiate" your top up by
visiting a tube station and actually making a TUBE journey, something
which not everybody will want to do.

pedant Or a DLR journey /pedant

But what's to stop you touching straight back out, then getting the
ticket
office to cancel out the pair of transactions?

How would that work? Would I just touch my Oyster twice on the same
reader

If you go through a barrier it's not the "same reader", just the "same
line of gates".

Okay, the next door reader - if I choose the right pair of gates ;-)

As you will be doing this at a LUL station (so there's a suitable ticket
office to talk to), the ones with ticket offices virtually all have
barriers, surely?

Of course. What point are you making?

then go to the ticket office and ask them to cancel a 'phantom' journey?

Yes.

As someone said earlier there seem to be a number of cases where the user
has to come up with a clever way of working round the system rather than the
system working sensibly. In this case 'working sensibly' would be being
able to switch on auto top-up at the ticket office.

regards

Stephen

--
Roland Perry

On Sun, 23 Nov 2008 06:40:41 -0800 (PST),
Mr Thant wrote:
On 23 Nov, 14:23, "tim....." wrote:
And what rule is it that makes this method of "top up" un-refundable if you
don't use it?

Auto top-up triggers whenever the balance falls below £5. Thus your
balance is always in the £5-£25 range, never below. The loophole I'm
suggesting is to add cash before each journey to keep it in the £5-£10
range, but what you can't ever do with a card with auto top-up enabled
is spend the last £5.

You can still have the card refunded of course, but then you have no
Oyster Card.

The topup triggers when you ENTER a station with your balance below
5GBP. So you should top you your card before every journey to 5.10 and
then the topup won't trigger. There are a handful of journeys where your
card balance can actually go negative if you plan it right (but the
deposit will be more than the negative balance)

Tim.

--
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = - @B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t,"
and there was light.

http://www.woodall.me.uk/

In message , at 11:26:29 on
Mon, 24 Nov 2008, Stephen Osborn
remarked:

If you go through a barrier it's not the "same reader", just the "same
line of gates".

Okay, the next door reader - if I choose the right pair of gates ;-)

What's "pair of gates" got to do with it?

As you will be doing this at a LUL station (so there's a suitable ticket
office to talk to), the ones with ticket offices virtually all have
barriers, surely?

Of course. What point are you making?

That a station with a gateline probably has a ticket office. Conversely
one without (and just pads to touch in/out and no gates) probably
doesn't.

In this case 'working sensibly' would be being able to switch on auto
top-up at the ticket office.

I agree.
--
Roland Perry

On Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:56:59 -0800 (PST),
MIG wrote:
On Nov 23, 8:10*pm, Mr Thant
wrote:
On 23 Nov, 20:03, David of Broadway
wrote:

An unregistered card can't be issued a refund? *Then how are non-UK
residents expected to obtain refunds? *(When I tried to register my
Oyster card to a USA address in 2005, I was told that only UK addresses
were valid.)

No, MIG is complaining that auto top-up needs registration, and that
refunds require you to make a tube journey to pick them up (as does
enabling auto top-up). I don't think refunds require registration.

It may not be correct, but it's what was implied when I had a query.
I emailed with my card number with a question about what on Earth had
happened to my balance, and eventually got a reply saying that I was
owed £4. (I actually thought that the discrepancy was 40p.)

In order to pick up the refund, I was told that I had to both nominate
a station and register my details. I wasn't offered another means of
getting the refund, but something complicated may be possible if one
is overseas. In the end I didn't bother and they are 40p up.

You can't get a refund unless you use the tube within a certain number
of days (8 weeks?). So if you're abroad/in another bit of the country
and not planning to visit London for a few months then TfL will eat the
refund and there's nothing you can do.

It's also impossible to get your oyster refunded if you live abroad and
have topped it up with both cash and a credit card (at least you can get
it refunded, they'll send a GBP cheque to your US address in a month or
two but if you've used two different methods to top up the card they
cannot refund it - the implication was that the card could have been
refunded if only credit card or only cash had been used to buy and top
it up). My collegue who got caught by this just sold his card to someone
else for the value on the card plus the deposit. (With the right group
of people who make various journeys every day it's also possible to
arrange so that the value on the card will go negative by a good
proportion of the deposit if you don't want to bother with trying to get
that back from TfL)

Tim.


--
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = - @B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t,"
and there was light.

http://www.woodall.me.uk/

"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 11:26:29 on Mon,
24 Nov 2008, Stephen Osborn
remarked:

If you go through a barrier it's not the "same reader", just the "same
line of gates".

Okay, the next door reader - if I choose the right pair of gates ;-)

What's "pair of gates" got to do with it?

Well I would need to touch in at an entry gate and touch out at an exit
gate. Normally the line of gates has a mix of both and so one could pick an
adjacent pair where one is entry and the other is exit, that is all.

As you will be doing this at a LUL station (so there's a suitable ticket
office to talk to), the ones with ticket offices virtually all have
barriers, surely?

Of course. What point are you making?

That a station with a gateline probably has a ticket office. Conversely
one without (and just pads to touch in/out and no gates) probably doesn't.

Yes, I had taken that for granted in your initial post.

regards

Stephen

In this case 'working sensibly' would be being able to switch on auto
top-up at the ticket office.

I agree.
--
Roland Perry