Main site and forum integration work

I know a lot of you have been having issues with logging into the forums, and there has been much confusion due to having two places to register - at www.stormcock.net itself, and on the forums here.

I am going to try and rework the "bridge" code this week to fix all this, so this is a heads up that if I break it and you can't log in, please hang on in there while I work on it. I'm testing on a copy of the site first but often problems don't arise until real users get their hands on things. I'll post a reply here once I think things are working

 

OK then. In *theory* the following is now in place:

1) If you originally registered at www.stormcock.net (the "front site" with news, podcasts etc) your account is carried over to the forums here, *including* your password and email info. You can login on the main site and be logged into the forums automatically as before, but if for some reason that doesn't work (browser problems etc) you should be able to log in on the forums here directly, and it will work.

2) If you originally registered just on the forums here, you didn't have a login on the main site before. Now, if you try to log in on the main site it'll discover your forums account and carry it over and set things up for you.

The main site is the central user registry, so if you change your password on the main site, it gets carried over to the forum. If you change your password on the forum, it won't affect the main site password and it may get overwritten with your main site password if you do account updates on the main site.

That's probably all as clear as mud. Anyway let's see how it goes.

 

I've updated the forum software to 3.7. This includes a number of new features, which I'll leave you to discover :biggrin:

I have also enabled the fancy "What you see is what you get" editor for all users. If this causes problems (e.g. for people on mobile phones) you can alter this via the "User CP" -> "Edit Options" and at the bottom set Message Editor Interface to "Standard Editor"

Cheers

Paul.

 

I believe you're the person that was browing the site over the weekend from an Opera mobile browser and causing the anti hacker alerts to trigger. I updated some security software and it was set a little too sensitive; the opera stuff sends lots of requests to the server in a small period of time and the heuristics of the hacking prevention stuff thought it was you being naughty.

I altered these settings late on Sunday, please do let me know if you continue having problems, Linn.

 

Don't worry, if you misbehave too much I'll just send the giant white ball out to get you. So if you hear that distant roaring sound...

Actually, the opera stuff works weirdly and it's not your fault at all. I think requests go through some sort of proxy server and it deals with re-jigging content for a mobile screen. The weird thing is that the requests don't always come from the same actual client address, they come from various ones all "close to each other" in networking terms, and so it looks a little suspect if you're watching for hijacking attempts and the like...

 

I may have found and fixed the final problem that was stopping people from remaining logged in properly on the forums (particularly if they had stuff bookmarked from stormcock.net rather than www.stormcock.net).

 

Upcoming birthdays is still on the main page, on the left now, since I removed the right column.

I removed the forum posts block as I needed to cut down on the amount of info on the main page, but there is a forum summary that tells you how many new posts you have, whether you have any private messages...

 

OK, that was an easy one to change