My original Apple ID is giving me grief when I try to log on to Support- Communities. Can somebody help?

Question

I had to create a new email address, then using the new email address I created this Apple ID to log in here.  But my normal email address (and original Apple ID) is giving me nothing but grief when I try to log on to support->communities.  On my iPhone: [ When I type in my normal email address and password, I'm taken to another login page that says in red letters "Please sign in again.  For added security, we need to reconfirm your Apple ID."  When I re-enter my password, I get an error "Safari cannot open the page. The error was: "cannot decode raw data". " ]
On my iMac running Firefox, same story but the error is something about unable to load data because of an unsupported compressed format, and it says to contact the web administrator (which would be Apple) - when I press the button "try again" it gets me to the appleid.apple.com page that asks me to pick a user name (to be seen by other members of the community).  From there I also run in circles (see below):
Telephone tech support keeps sending me to appleid.apple.com which also gives me nothing but grief:  it asks me to pick a user id (a nickname to be used in the forums) but when I do, I get the error message in red font telling me that there is already somebody using my Apple ID (which is of course my email and therefore is my account)  -- so why are they asking me to pick a user ID if I already have one?  This is very frustrating.  When I call and talk to tech support, they try to get me to buy extended service to help me log in, but the reason I'm trying to log in to support->communities is because I can't afford extended service.  The people patient enough to stay on the phone tell me to go to iTunes and fill out a support request, but there's no option to fill out a support request for website difficulties.  Please help!
I think this is probably because my original Apple ID was "mtalldude" and instead of creating a new account when Apple switched to using email addresses as Apple IDs I just changed my ID to my email address. My original ID may be ten or twenty years old. I don't mind saying that my new login id (the one I'm having trouble with) is sal_mander at hotmail in case a website administrator is reading this and can help me and needs this info and can reset whatever is broken and is not allowing me to pick a user name.  Please don't spam me fellow humans!

Answer 1

Thanks for the flag J.K. - they contaced me and solved my problem.  On this account (which I created just to ask this question), I log in with my email rather than my user name (mtalldud). On the account that I was having trouble with, they told me to use my user ID instead of my email to log in and it worked. This is a bit confusing and seems a bit inconsistent but at least I don't need this temporary account any more to get into this community and find answers!