February 1, 2008 at 8:54 am
Can you please get rid of the awfull login/registration procedure!
Everytime I click an article from within visual studio 2005 I aut. go to the article,then the login/subscription procedure screws up the search and I end up at the home page of your site! This doesn't help! I have to search to get to right topic, takes to much time. If you don't fix this I won't use it anymore and will have to ask microsoft to exclude you in the search from Visual studio.....
February 1, 2008 at 9:00 am
The registration is something we require to get an idea of the audience and satisfy the advertisers on the site. It has driven the growth of this site to be the largest SQL site out there and it won't be going away.
If you save cookies, it will work fine and log you in. If you don't, then you need to log in, not register, when you click a link.
February 1, 2008 at 9:19 am
Yes after spending half an hour of my time login in confirming etc I know how it works now. If you have to log in you lose the link! If this site is ment to be an extention of the help fuction it should just do that!
thank you.
April 22, 2008 at 1:23 am
I completely agree. I clicked on a link again today and was faced with an interface requiring my email address and password which I duly entered. It then required that I enter my password in both fields and then told me I was already registered.
What a surprise. I go to a web page to read an article which an email told me about, which I receive because I am registered. Therefore, of course I am already registered.
If I must be logged in then allow me to do that!! And no, going back to another page or the home page to log in is not the answer, it's simple - put the log in option on the same pink pop up that the registration is on.
For an IT site this has absolutely no understanding of how a user friendly site should be constructed and constantly puts me off using the site.
April 27, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I'm having the same problem: I found this site through Google, was pleased to register because it looks invaluable to me in my new project, and tried to go read the article that had brought me to the site in the first place. But it wanted me to register (again) before i could see the article. When I click away to other pages on the site, the top banner greets me by name, so I AM registered. When I Search the site for my subject and go to one of the matches, the top line shows me as unregistered.
My suspicion is that the code is not actually at fault, but that there's something about my cookie permissions that's confusing it. The system I'm using has some odd quirks in its permissions structure that causes some eccentricities - for instance, a number of blocks of text on EBay don't display, HungerSite.com won't display its ad icons, etc. Mostly things work as you'd expect, and I haven't spotted the difference by screen to screen comparison of security options with my other system, but I'm pretty sure that's what's at work - especially if only a handful of us are having this problem. Could someone spell out the exact cookie requirements for SqlServerCentral so I/we could experiment?
April 28, 2008 at 8:13 am
Mike,
I'll try to get you an answer, but as far as I know it's a simple cookie with only a few values in it. If you have a cookie on your machine, it should be working. Usually it is a security setup on the client that isn't working for some reason.
Which browser are you using and what security is setup for our site?
The registration process isn't going away. It's probably going to get worse in terms of the entire Internet over time as everyone wants to track who is coming to their site, demographics, etc. It becomes important to sell advertising and determine values.
We have lots of good information that doesn't cost you $$, but it costs you a registration. If you don't agree the price is worth it, then you will have to find the information elsewhere and I wish you good luck.
April 28, 2008 at 9:39 am
Hi, Steve -
Sorry if I wasn't clear: I have no objection at all to registration, and I am in fact registered, and I have a sqlservercentral cookie on my machine (I can send a copy if it will help). Your site recognizes me at the start of the breadcrumb trail on every screen and lets me into this forum, but it stops recognizing me when I click a match from the search list and wants me to register again. By my reading, I think that's what's happening to the other folks in this thread. I don't think it's a flaw in your code since so few people seem to be affected, but there's something more subtle at work, probably in my security settings, and that's what I'm looking for clues to. The particular system I've been running on the last few months (XP/SP2) came with something defaulted a little funky that caused problems in IE (6 or 7) - specific pieces of specific sites that won't load, while mostly behaving as expected. (I went to my backup system and logged in to SqlServerCentral for the first time - the search matches come up fine.) I have of course done visual inspection of every possibly relevant setting between machines, but haven't tumbled to the difference yet. What I can see is that while my primary system responds correctly for most or all other pages on your site, it fails somehow when you open up a search match page. There would appear to be something you check or expect in that specific case that my system is mishandling. That's why I was thinking that if we could identify the specific failure it would point me to the errant setting.
Sorry to rattle on, but I'd rather give too much info than waste your time with too little.
April 28, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Mike,
Sorry for the delay and it's good to get the info from your side. I haven't seen that behavior, but I'll pass along to our support people and see if they can dupe something. I'd bet it's some zone/security thing as we use the Google custom search, but I have no idea as well what it could be.
April 30, 2008 at 4:43 am
Can you try the same thing using a different browser?
How about if you add the SQL Server Central URL as one of your trusted sites in IE?
April 30, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Good ideas, but no good luck. With the site listed for Allow in the Privacy settings, IE still throws me back to the home page, although it does remember me as logged in now and doesn't offer up the registration box. Firefox throws me back to the home page and forgets my login, but it randomly does or does not offer me the registration dialog.
May 2, 2008 at 2:36 am
hmm, interesting. Given that roughly the same thing happens in multiple browsers, the problem must lie either with the OS, or how you connect to the outside world. Are you going through a Poxy Server (yes, I know how it should be spelt), or similar networking device? Can you temporarily bypass it?
As you are using Visual Studio, can you try:
------------------------------------------------------
1. Start Visual Studio 2005.
2. On the View menu, point to Other Windows, and then click Web Browser.
An authentication message may appear when the integrated Web browser tries to access a Web site. If you are prompted for authentication credentials, go to step 3.
3.Enter a valid username and password.
The Visual Studio 2005 Start Page and Visual Studio 2005 online Help may now function correctly.
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I love the repeated usage of the word "may". Great stuff. By the way, this is explained in more detail at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910804
On another tack, is there some program (eg. Anti Virus with Host Intrustion Prevention) that could be preventing access to the cookie? This is pretty unlikely, but might be worth investigating.
One last idea - you could visit:
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable
and download the "Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition" from PortableApps. This runs entirely from a USB stick (including all temp files, cookies, etc). Would be interesting to know if that works.
Andy
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