Case Sensitive URLs: A TERRIBLE Idea!

Dear SmugMug,

First let me say I'm a fan and I am happy your service exists. That being said, I actually had to register on here just to post this and I would appreciate some actual consideration on this topic and not some blanket statement reply I've seen given to other people asking about this. I've been shooting for many years dealing with prints directly and I just recently signed up for your service, which generally seems great but a few things are highly irritating as a professional and should be corrected immediately!

Mainly, why on Earth would you guys think using case-sensitive URLs would be a good idea? This is the most business-killing scheme you could have implemented! The idea of being user friendly is to make things EASIER for the end user not complicate it by having to tell them "be sure to pay attention to case sensitivity." Not only have you alienated EVERY customer's clients who may have received earlier advertising material using all lowercase URLs but in essence most end users fundamentally understand that case doesn't typically matter because it's GOOD PROGRAMMING PRACTICE to ignore case within URLs and not many sites out there use this practice (mainly because, and I say this in a statistical manner, many people as a whole are fairly ignorant to "computer stuff").

Now I've been scouring the forums for answers on what's going on with this and if there is a way to bypass them and it seems the generic answer is that you did this just to differentiate customer URLs from your internal system URLs? I'm sorry to be so frank here but that's just stupid. The differentiation should come from the subdomain of the customer username not from the casing of the appended paths.

Scenario: "www.smugmug.com/signup"
Let's say I decide to create a gallery called "Signup" for whatever hypothetical reason. Even without case sensitivity, why should "austincaine.smugmug.com/signup" go to YOUR signup page anyway? What's the logic there? My clients aren't on my page to become SmugMug customers, they're there to purchase photos from me. If I want to refer people I would send them to "www.smugmug.com" not "austincaine.smugmug.com". Do you see what I'm getting at here?

This is a HUGE PROBLEM as I've only been with your service for barely a couple of months and I've already received numerous emails from clients asking why the page says "Page Not Found" when they go to the URL I give them. Keep in mind I even put a line of text "type the URL exactly as shown" and yes, it was capitalized properly on the card. It's not a difficult concept to grasp, I realize, but unfortunately many of our end users and clients may not be as savvy as the rest of us developer types.

Do you have plans to fix this? Perhaps even limiting gallery names in a manner that I cannot even create a gallery called "Signup" because it is a "reserved namespace" or something similar.

Thank you for your consideration!