Something is broken about forum logins

I composed a reply to this thread:

When I clicked the “submit” button, it took me to a login page.

It would not allow me to login to that page. If I tried, I would just get the same login page.
If I tried to login afresh in a different tab, I got the standard login page, but it would not allow me to login there, either. I would just keep getting the same login page.

Back to the first tab, where I had tried to submit a post - I used the back button, to at least try to get back to the text that I had written. And all I could get is the same login page – perhaps that’s a browser bug (rekonq), but the rest of this seems to involve forum bugs.

I am currently posting with firefox, a completely different browser. I had no problem with that, probably because it doesn’t share any cookies from the other login session.

In the mean time, I have lost what I had carefully composed. I’m not seeing any notification about saved text, so I expect that it is lost for good.

My honest opinion:

Make a fresh start. Completely separate the forum login from the novell/attachmate login. Stick entirely to what vb forum software supports. I would prefer a forum that works, that doesn’t arbitrarily log me out in the middle of replying, and that doesn’t destroy data, even if that requires having a separate login/password.

On Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:16:02 +0000, nrickert wrote:

> In the mean time, I have lost what I had carefully composed. I’m not
> seeing any notification about saved text, so I expect that it is lost
> for good.

Sorry to hear about the lost post - I recommend the Lazarus plugin for
saving form data. And also, to see if the issue persists for some
reason, clear cache/cookies and log back in.

There’s no reason why what you saw should have happened - the timeout is
configured so that any activity after login pokes the timer (as I
understand it, Matt may want to comment here).

The problems have been much better in recent history, so I don’t think
we’ll be ripping and replacing the authentication system. But thanks for
the feedback and the report of a problem.

Jim


Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

I would think that rekonq is blocking third party cookies. Third party cookies are cookies originating from a site that we are not currently browsing. Browsers tend to block those as these cookies are used by snooping purposes by ad-engines

on other hand, whenever i get a private message and i am not logged in into forums, the link from the “email” takes me to vb4 login and not attachmate login :frowning:

On Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:46:02 +0000, vazhavandan wrote:

> on other hand, whenever i get a private message and i am not logged in
> into forums, the link from the “email” takes me to vb4 login and not
> attachmate login :frowning:

Now you mention it, I’ve noticed this as well - I’ll ping the appropriate
person to get that URL added to the rule so the proper authentication
prompt is presented.

Jim


Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

That makes things quicker . Many thanks.

No, it isn’t. I changed that some time ago.

Actually, I think I changed it in konqueror, and rekonq gets the same settings.

In any case, I have since restarted rekonq and it is now behaving better.

so, 15 minutes ago or so (from posting time), i go to
https://en.opensuse.org/Submitting_Bug_Reports#Searching_for_bugs to
search for a 12.3 bug and see that there is no link to 12.3 so decide
to add one (i added 12.1 and 12.2 and maybe others) and click to
login, the credentials show in the drop down and i just click login
and then this page is rendered: URL: http://susepaste.org/73243975

then, when i go (again) to
https://en.opensuse.org/Submitting_Bug_Reports#Searching_for_bugs i
see i am NOT logged in…

if needed i have an image which shows the bottom part of that page
which is missing in the first shot.

strange code


dd

Yes I have had that exact situation recently, several times, but not yesterday. Now I wish I had made notes. Mainly SeaMonkey, but with Firefox also.

My impressions: more login forum difficulties recently compared to normal (excellent here). One where I couldn’t login forum or via openSUSE for some time although I could see all web pages.

In the mean time, I have lost what I had carefully composed. I’m not seeing any notification about saved text, so I expect that it is lost for good.

Really annoying! So if it’s more than a few lines, I often copy to clipboard just before posting it, especially at the first sign of trouble, if the browser back button gets me there.

Leading up to and through the new release is a particularly bad time to have forum login problems when there is also pressure on the servers and delays even when getting normal updates on the older release. At this time the forum can make a difference between keeping or losing users who may be frustrated with early installation problems. :slight_smile:

On 03/14/2013 12:43 PM, dd wrote:
> so, 15 minutes ago or so (from posting time), i go to
> https://en.opensuse.org/Submitting_Bug_Reports#Searching_for_bugs to
> search for a 12.3 bug and see that there is no link to 12.3 so decide
> to add one (i added 12.1 and 12.2 and maybe others) and click to
> login, the credentials show in the drop down and i just click login
> and then this page is rendered: URL: http://susepaste.org/73243975
>
> then, when i go (again) to
> https://en.opensuse.org/Submitting_Bug_Reports#Searching_for_bugs i
> see i am NOT logged in…

followup… logged in again, and this time it worked and landed on the
correct page…when finished editing the wiki i logged out and got
the logout page…

then some time later i clicked a link in a forum post taking me to
the web forum where i saw i was still logged in!! logged out again,
got the logged out page, and when checking i was logged out…

and, (maybe should have mentioned earlier) several times in the last
several days i have clicked on a link in an nntp post, like:

View this thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php?t=483966

but instead of landing on the desired thread/page i end up on
http://forums.opensuse.org/

this used to happen often and it seems to be back!


dd

On 2013-03-14 16:09, dd wrote:
> View this thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php?t=483966
>
> but instead of landing on the desired thread/page i end up on
> http://forums.opensuse.org/
>
> this used to happen often and it seems to be back!

I have experienced that as well several times, several threads. I close
the tab and click on the link again, and sometimes it works.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))

I just ran into a somewhat similar problem. I was unable to access the forums with “rekonq”, so switched to “firefox”. Restarting “rekonq” probably would have worked, too.

In this case, I have a little more information.

Everything was going well with the forum. And then I posted a bug report. After posting the bug report, I could not access the forum again. And I suspect that might have also been what happened for the original report in this thread.

It is looking as if there might be some interference (probably with cookie use) between forum logins and bugzilla access. Note that I did not have to separately login to bugzilla - it apparently recognized the attachmate cookie (or whatever cookie is used).

This seems to be a problem with rekonq, but probably not with firefox. Hmm, I have third party cookies enabled in rekonq, but I usually have them disabled in firefox. (Sorry, just doing a brain dump of anything that might be relevant).

@nrickert you are probably being logged out after session expiry. The other day i saw that expiry time is 420 minutes or something

I doubt that. Sequence of events:

(1) posted to a thread;
(2) filed a bug report;
(3) went back to the thread to post the bug information;
(4) tried to edit my post to fix a typo - and that is where it hung.

Those were all within a few minutes of one another. The attachmate cookie was still good for the bugzilla.

And I was quick enough logging in again (with firefox this time) to be able to fix the typo before the edit window had elapsed.

So far I have not had any issues as described

I have experienced problems with the forum over the last 2-3 days, not frequently but seriously punctuating long periods of excellence.

It ranged here from browser messages about waiting on the forum during a session (i.e. not attachmate login) with long pauses, to being logged out with a “not responding” login entry (top right of page), or stuck during re-editing a post within time limit and with missing formatting bars. The latter problem generated a double posting but no exit from the editing page. It is a real time-waster, since there is no obvious error msg. Logging out out and back in attempt didn’t clear it. I eventually closed browser, reopened, delete cookies and re-login to recover normality.