Why do I have to sign into forums everytime now?

Why am I having to sign in everytime I come to the forums now?

It's borked They're working on it.

I'd hope soon.
I don't like most of the stuff they've done to the site tbh. Like, up at the top of the screen I used to be able to click support and go to their support site.
Now I get to click on something that takes me to a post that has link misdirects and slightly outdated information. Pain in the rear.

There are a lot of threads already about this, in one of them a mod stated that he was told that this was done to the site as a new security measure.
Personally I don't think that there are 3 people in that whole organiztion that are on the same page.
It is absolutely ridiculous that the links to get to the support site were removed from the forums, it is even more ridiculous that it happened on Monday and there is no one there that has enough knowledge to put the links back in what is obviously a global header template.

Lempo@Everfrost wrote:

This has always been the biggest problem with SOE

I hate the SOE forums. I am a message board junkie, so I appreciate well made forums. This is probably one of the worst ones I visit on a regular basis. If the software was better, I would participate more.

Can't stay signed in - right now, you get signed out with like 5 minutes of inactivity, but even before this, you would have to sign in at least every few days - I have forums I visit that never log me out.
Message marked read you haven't read. Seems the messages are all marked read after you have been inactive for some amount of time. I like forums that don't mark a message as read until you actually, you know, read it (or otherwise mark it read).
Go to last read post - is often screwed up.

Vbulletin is a great forum software with many features... heck, phpbb is free and is a lot better than the SOE forums.

I can't think of one advantage the SOE forums have.

Caela wrote:

The SOE forums used to run under Lithium back in the day (if I remember correctly). Then one day they switched to this in-house solution, filled with bugs. Over the years, they fixed maybe 1/3 of the bugs (there was a time where posting a certain sequence of characters would make the forum return an error when trying to access the thread, for example...), leaving a few major usability issues such as those you mentionned. Another "fun" thing that they never fixed: you can embed HTML in a post. Try posting an HTML form, save your post, edit it, then save it back. Your post will then get form input fields. Kinda amateurish that they don't properly handle HTML, if you ask me. I pointed out that issue a few years ago, and I encountered it again (accidentally) only last month.
I would also think that vBulletin would suit their needs just fine - it's used by other game publishers who have a similar forum load, so I can't think of any good reason for them to still use this in-house solution that is visibly not maintained. God knows what security issues do exist in their home-made forum software, waiting for someone to run into it, and turn the forums into a post-nuclear wasteland.

The forums were awful in 2004, and they are even worse now. They need to cut their losses and switch to software that works.

Its a bit of a mess at the moment for sure the forums seem dead now i really hope they fix it soon its been a week or so hasnt it?

It's probably a way to discourage people from posting. You read and when you go to post, you need to log in again first. At that point some people would just decide it's not worth the bother.

Gladiolus wrote:

The cynic in me tells me you're right sadly either way its hurting the community here

I wouldn't mind so much, except it kicks me back to the homepage when I sign in, no matter where I was before.

Just more proof they do not care about the people that sub and pay their slary's anymore. They are in it for the SC crowd for the most part. First was lack of response to the player bases feedback, then they buff up their favorite class ( SK's ) while making most other fighter types nearly 3rd rate ( granted brawlers got a lil love with DoV ).
They have promised eq2player.com returns only to then not follow thru ( surprise, surprise ) with their promises it would be up and looking better then ever. Well who wants to bet they are still laughing at us for believing in them on that one. Now it's the forums which is over a week now and still not fixed for this annoyance. Yeah wtg SOE team for inspiring confidence with your player base.
At this point I really should not be surprised by this, just more disheartend by now would be the more appropriate term.

The forum auto logout has been changed to 3-hours now. This should satisfy the security reasons for the change as well as allow a decent amount of time before needing to log back in.
EQ2Players is very much "coming soon." I know you won't believe it until you see it, but it truly shouldn't be very long now. I haven't seen it with my own eyes, but others on my team have.

Kryvak@Everfrost wrote:

Only because someone was too inept to return you to the referring URL after the login, absolutely nothing to do with security and everything to do with not adhering to standard web design practices.

I wrote to FORUM ADMIN and received this message. This is inexcusable and SOE needs to rethink this policy. They are making players unwelcome and the security is a joke as there are apps out there on the net you can use to bypass their forced login. This is the message from Forum admin.
Unfortunately, due to security reasons we had to disable that feature and change the way everyone logs in to the forums. We have recently adjusted the forums so that it will now keep you logged in for up to three hours.

Why does this forum need to have such annoying "security" while no other forum does is beyond me. If anything, people will go back to using simpler passwords since they have to re-enter it regularily, driving them to have LESS security in the end.
Too much security tends to drive your users to find ways to make their life easier, with an end result of having less security. Yellow Post-It with passwords on them anyone?
Plus, I now see TWO Logout links at the top, which makes it look as if whoever implemented this did a poorly hacked job, with zero review of the final result. Honestly SOE, this doesn't look professional at all.

Now everytime that I log in to the forums I get a 404 Error. The only way to get in is to refresh AFTER signing in and getting the blank 404 error screen.
Also of note .. The View posts made since my last visit no longer works and repeatedly gives me a 500 error.

The website cannot display the page
HTTP 500

Most likely causes:

• The website is under maintenance.
• The website has a programming error.

What you can try:

For more information about HTTP errors, see Help.
Very frustrating.

Amnerys wrote:

3 hours is absurd. 14 days is the minimum of any modern forum.

Glenedhel, please strip that code out of your post.

Making something more annoying does not improve security. Look at User Account Control. Oh, it's secure all right. It's one of the strongest security services Microsoft has ever built. Unfortunately, it's also so bloody annoying that the first thing anyone with a Vista+ system does is turn it off. How's that for security?
As Feldon pointed out elsewhere, making people log in more often simply gives a keylogger more opportunities to log that password before the user realizes what's going on.
So, in summary, you've made the service more annoying, less convenient and less secure. Excellent!