Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General My old name isn't working ... anyone else having

Every time I try to log on I have to ask for a temp password as my old one isn't accepted. Then when i try to change to a perm password i can't get it to accept that either. Any suggestions?

No one had any suggestions from this morning so I'm trying again. I can log in with a temp password but canNOT change it. I finally did a complete reregister. This is sort of rediculous is it not? One time it wouldn't even accept the temp password you sent me. If I can't get any help this time, I'm out of here.

have you tried clearing internet cache?

After you log in are you going into your profile and changing your password? Once you log in with a temp password that becomes your password until you go into the profile, enter a new one and save that to your profile.

You also may need to reset your browser cookies.

--Doug

Just curious, do you use your email as user name?

Apologies for not posting this earlier, but it took a few days to figure out the problem, and at that time I was engaged with other commitments.

There is a problem posting with anyone who uses firefox plus extensions which obscure the referrer string (it may very well affect IE configurations which also adjust referrer strings, but I cannot attest to this authoritatively). I am using IE7 presently to connect to this site in an attempt to prove it, rather than reconfigure my version of Firefox, since I play with the referrer string in Firefox to transparently expose on server logs for sites I oversee, which visits need be excluded because they are my own. In other words, I do it for business. This of and by itself should not be the cause, but I have in the past used different extensions for adjusting the referrer strings in firefox, and extensions, even after removal, can leave ghost traces which are difficult to track down. The manner in which Firefox updates versions over pre-existing versions is another place where these ghost traces can be exaggerated. I will at some point in the near future rebuild my version of Firefox from scratch, and see if I cannot resolve the issue.

The error message I received multiple times when attempting to post on this board, after logging on is:
It is doubtful that my problem is a firewall, since (this is liable to be too geeky for many) I do not use a firewall per se, but instead take advantage of the NAT router to act as a firewall in my small home LAN that connects outbound to the net through a DSL moden. There is a possibility that my default stealthed network configuration of dropping all external ICMP and NetBios requests that do not originate from pre-specified MAC Addresses is where the problem lies, but I do not think this is the case, and if this message has been posted, that is a very slim possibility.

Hopefully, this has shed a bit of extra illumination on the member connection problems caused by the new board software.

cheers

I just rebuilt Firefox from scratch without using adding any extension that will mess with the referrer string. If this post is published, then the problem with my being unable to post here using Firefox was due to a crappy extension from the past which had never properly uninstalled.

cheers

I just had to buy a new PC and had to buy from the business unit to get XP, as all the retail, home units now come with VISTA. I know VISTA is a problem for some telecommuters to access their work. Would VISTA pose a problem for protected sites like CHB, as well?

I have no problem and use Vista on two machines without incident.

Short answer: I'd be very surprised if VISTA using a mainstream web browser set at its defaults were the source of any recent log in problems at Reader Rant.

Now the Long Version of the answer:

My initial problem with logging onto ReaderRant as a member had nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with my preference of FireFox as my default browser, as well as wanton attitude for trying out new Firefox Extensions.

Specifically in this instance, it was related to client-side HTTP Referrer Header Field.
The description degeekified: Generally, if you arrive at a webpage, because of another webpage's link, your web browser tells the server of the linked-to page, where you've just been. The server then stores that information in the visitor log files. There are some net users who feel this is a type of privacy invasion, and obscure all HTTP Referrer from leaving their browser. I have played with several different FireFox add-in that make changes to the default browser behavior within the last few years. There are still a very small number of sites which I travel to on the web that I do not desire the information to be in their server logs. An example could be that if I desired to read content hosted on Stormfront, and had learned about it from the Southern Poverty Law Center, I'd rather that the Nazi A**holes did not acquire the data from me. These extensions are only a bit of a time-saver when used for this purpose, because if one right-clicks--copies a link on a webpage, then jumps to their home page--pastes the link into the browser, and goes to the location, the Referrer is blank. This is what I do for those sites. There are other reasons why one might desire to mess with their Referrer and UserAgent HTTP Header Fields, but most of those are a bit more complex, and are often are the gray or pitch dark side of ethics. I have another reason to do it for sites that I am responsible for overseeing though. That is a simple method for filtering out my visits to these sites from the visitor logs. I use a referrer extension for only that reason presently, and what I do is droop an absurd string for the referrer header when I browse to them. Presently I use: "It's Not Your Mom", because I can easily remeber that anytime I see that string in a logfile, it is pointing back at me, and I have forgotten to filter these out.

FireFox extensions are not always coded properly, and the programmers have not made due diligence to assure that all of their little snippets of code are removed if the extension is uninstalled. Up until a couple of days ago, I had only upgraded Firefox over existing versions, or had imported my personal user files from the prior versions in its entirety for several years now. These bits and pieces of leftover code had become left-over ghosts in the program, which up until the issue with logging in to this site, were just minor irritants, that had not motivated me to rebuild FireFox from scratch.

I suspect that this board's codebase uses Referrer Strings as an assurance method that users are authenticated. It is data that could be part of a cookie, or a session ID label, and would only be given when one travels from a log-in event to the redirected default webpage post-log-in. Somehow, old not completely removed FireFox extensions were either distorting this data, or eliminating it.