Having To Login At Every Turn, Since Yesterday

These are the kind of things that there isn't much of anything that I can do anything about. Occasionally, but rarely, I can go into the Admin area and find that there were database errors, and there's a cleanup/reset that I can trigger the forum software to do, but that almost never solves a problem. There are just so many things that can go wrong, and nearly all of them are things that I can't do anything about.

Browser problems are common because the companies that make the browsers employ people to maintain the browser software and, if only to justify their jobs, they are constantly making changes, adding features, and otherwise tweaking the browser software, which may work fine in some places, but cause problems in others. If I can switch to another browser, and find that the problem goes away, then it might be just a matter of using another browser for a while. Very likely, another upgrade in the original browser will fix the problem.

Connections problems probably have a lot to do with things that might go wrong, and when I say that, I am not speaking only of the Internet connection that you pay for. Your ISP connects you to the Internet, but the Internet is made up of billions of connection points along the way, any of which might be affected by computer problems, DDOS attacks, hacks, or other glitches that might not be able to be attributed to anything in particular.

When you log into the forum, your browser sends a message to the server that hosts the forum, which returns data to your browser, which are put together to form what we know of as the forum, but this isn't a direct connection and the bits of data doesn't necessarily even follow the same route. Thus, it's not a simple matter of a problem being either on your end or on the forum host's end, as a problem anywhere in between can cause a problem.

Whenever I look at a live datamap of DDOS or hacking attempts around the world, it seems that the United States is the main target for DDOS or hacking attempts from throughout the world, but mostly China. Despite the reputation that a lot of people want to place on Russia, very little of it seems to be coming from Russia. Next to China, it seems that the next most common source of DDOS attacks against US servers comes from the United States. Whether these are governments, organizations, or individuals, I don't know, but a lot of attacks against US Internet points originate in the United States.

Because DDOS attacks target the Internet resources, even when they fail to take a target down, they can cause glitches in things that are heavily dependent on rapid interchanges, such as databases.

This particular problem, though, I suspect is the result of tweaks that are made to browsers in an attempt to make them more secure. I know that a couple of updates to the Safari browser have changed my own settings to default to not accepting any cookies, and the forum won't work without cookies. When they came out with a version for Mac, I was using the Microsoft Edge browser for a while, and I liked it. I wasn't sure whether I liked it more than Safari, but it was at least as good. Then an update in Edge made it impossible for me to log in to any site that I had to log into because it kept telling me that I would have to accept cookies, despite the fact that my settings were set to accept cookies. So I went back to Safari. Although they make a version for Mac, Microsoft doesn't support its version for Mac and, since they wouldn't even take a report from me, I saw no reason to believe the problem would be corrected. Maybe Edge would work again now, I don't know, but Safari works well enough that I think I'll just stick with it.

 

I've never had a problem staying logged in, although I'm still curious as to how folks get logged in here automatically when they open their browser. I only have one site that does that...it's a TV Guide kind of site. There is no site account setting (or Firefox setting) asking if I want it to do that...it just does.

Firefox clears cookies whenever I close it, but I have Cookie Clearing Exceptions set up for this site. I open Firefox in the morning after I lift the laptop lid to "Wake" it and do my WIN10 log in, and close all applications including Firefox when I go to bed, at which point I close the laptop lid and my system "Sleeps."

I've logged into this site using Safari and Firefox on my iPhone maybe twice for a short period of time and it's behaved fine, but other than that, I've not used any other browser for this site.

The only time I've had issues here is when there has been a global problem that everyone else has experienced.

 

Now I'M having a weird log-in issue (I've deleted the Firefox cookies for this site top try to fix it.)

Whenever I get an email notification for a New Reply, and I click on the link to go to that thread, a new tab for it opens (this is normal) but I am not logged in (this is not normal.) I am still logged in on all other existing SOC tab(s). The system will not permit me to log in, saying "Cookies are required to log in to this site. You will not be able to log in until they are accepted."

This site has always been set up in Firefox to allow/retain cookies. When I manually add https in front of the url from the email link, I am automatically logged in without having to do anything else.

This is a brand new issue for me. It has never happened before today. I've not changed any Firefox settings except that since this issue started, I added "http://www/seniorsonly.club" as another site to save cookies for (the "https:" version has always had cookies retained for it), but adding the http: version has not fixed the issue.

I do recall other conversations regarding this site not being "secure," and now it is. Do the notification emails need to have the included urls updated?

It's not a fatal error. I'm only reporting it as a data point.

 

Now it works fine. Go figger.