It may have gotten better though I still think it is a far reach till it is being dubbed .awesome here on FT. Besides that doesn't have the same ring.

That is kind of my point, as mentioned in my earlier post on reliability. There is a distinct difference between legitimate issues and hysteria. The problem in this forum (not seen in others) is that both types of issues arise with equal prominence.

Also FWIW, I just now sponsored a CR1 for someone just to see if it would work, and it went through without issue. My friend is now the lucky beneficiary of my test ! The 22 day siege must be over .

I agree that the functionality of .bomb has been much more reliable over the years. I love having a real-time view of your Mileage Account is great. I remember the old web-site which was not user-friendly & slow as ever. My success rate with booking flights has vastly improved over the last year. Using e-certs has been much easier too. I am not running into as many restrictions & errors when I try to use them.

Of course I still have problems with the site at times - but this website is not an easy task to maintain. I find a big problem with the Flight Status. It has consistently been unreliable for the past few months. It gets frustrating when someone is checking on your flight status and it says its canceled (or no reason for delay) but in reality, you are in-flight.

In the past, I have benefited from the .bomb site back in 2002 when they had a ticketing error and it was pricing LAX-MXP (Milan) tickets for only $33.26 in W-class. So I booked 4 tickets and took a nice spring break with some friends and even got upgraded to C-class.

It's been awhile since I've used a F&F cert. At the time that I did, you could either ask for an upgradeable fare or use the cert. Today, I was able to do both. I don't know how many months we've had it, or if it has a lengthy thread in this forum, but it was a happy surprise for me.

That is definitely true.
But I understand why: of united.com goes belly up we MP flyers are out of luck. With the almost perfectly helpless or then unhelpful UA CS gang, and about as many policies as all US regulations combined, there is little to be expected.

Glad to hear that sponsoring is on its legs again. Just the day before yesterday, I failed - using all comming browsers IE, Mozilla, and Opera - sponsoring a friend of mine.

No disagreement as to the qurikiness of this feature (which for the record is pretty much completely unique to UA). IME, the problem is usually related to the reservation itself though for some reason, not to the general feature on the website. The littlest thing causes it to choke, i.e. a pending schedule change (even for 1 minute) on the reservation, a thru flight that has a biz cabin on one leg & a first cabin on the second (i.e. flights from MEX that continue on), a paper ticket, ual.com's mood ring for the day, etc.

I will also say that recently, even phone sponsoring of upgrades has gone through without issue though - even if you don't sign the bluey (I had a couple chances to put this to the test where I was travelling w/ the sponsoree). YMMV of course.

Yes but there is no way to know if a reservation is 'wrong' or what is wrong with it. Hence the statements are of equal quality .
While it seems much like it and I agree in general, my milage did vary. And especially departing from ORD, the agents fire a broadside volley of arguments why they ought not honour the authorization. I had the copy of the bluey and the authorisation letter with me and called web support the day prior to make sure the authorisation is in.
If I did not throw a complete fit at the airport, they would not have cleared my upgrade .