cPanel forums exceptionally difficult to authenticate in to
I appreciate the friendly responses I get when I have to come here and ask questions. That being said I almost always have to fix something that cPanel broke which can sometimes waste entire days of my life so even if it's something easy and trivial I am not in a good mood when I come to the cPanel forums. But the cherry on top of the whole posting on these forums is the absolutely horrendous authentication. It takes several attempts and I'm pretty sure I'm forced to clear cookies every single time just to be allowed to sign in. Then I still have to sign in a second time apparently. I open this in a second tab (because I don't already have 50 tabs open in the current tab group) and then go back and reload the page because just because the second tab says I'm signed in doesn't mean the forums (on a completely different domain name I might add!) won't take it. I'm using the latest version of Waterfox which is exactly Firefox but with a lot of the ... nonsense removed (extreme self-censorship here). Please have someone fix the forum authentication system.
-
That's odd for sure, and I haven't heard any other complains about this. I frequently open anywhere from 30-50 tabs here each day and haven't run into anything like this myself.
0 -
Thank you for posting. It is incredibly incredibly clunky.
Just to leave this comment I had to try 3 times because the cPanel ID auth page experienced session errors twice, and when finally logged in the community software (I simply cant bring myself to call these forums) did not recognize the login session, so I had to go through the login prompt again for it finally sync the session together to make the connection.
I don't log in here anymore unless I really really have to.
1 -
@Porolifle Fuller which browser are you using? I think that might play a part as most "developers" aren't developers because they only test one browser (namely, Chrome). I clicked on the login link and it worked instantly this time though that is a rarity. Though again, I rarely come on here unless cPanel screwed up something bad enough so, usually once every few months.
0 -
Oh Chrome. Which is 100% the worst offender for this type of thing. If I had to pop on and off here a good bit I would certainly use a different browser. That said, session handoffs and software interlinking of authentication is a hugely common use pattern for modern web applications and the stack cPanel has assembled has been consistently brittle. Alas!
0 -
Thanks for the additional details. I spoke with our Zendesk guru about this issue and neither him nor I could confirm any odd behavior.
Is there any way you could make a ticket with a screen recording? If so, put "Attention Kyle Pinkley" in the subject line and we can check it out.
1 -
Rex, thanks for the response. Where would we submit a ticket? My server is a managed VPS with root access so I've never paid for cPanel, it just came with my current host so I'm not that familiar with the services here.
0 -
If you can't submit a ticket through the interface, email cs@cpanel.net and we'll get it going from there for you.
1 -
Rex, great, thank you.
In the interim I would recommend getting a browser you rarely use, clear the history (cache, cookies, etc) and try authenticating that way to see if you can reproduce the issue. However I imagine if that doesn't work it might be because the data is old and whoever programmed the authentication didn't take old records in to account.
0 -
Okay, thanks to Rex for helping out in multiple threads!
So every time I have to authentication I press G2 on my Logitech G110 keyboard to do desktop recording. I forgot to open the developer tools, iterate over cookies, etc...eh. But I now have two short 2560x1440 videos to privately share to show off the jank of trying to sign in to the forums.
Rex, how can I privately send these two videos (24.5MB total for both) to you? Will that email address accept a 12.3MB file and a 11MB file?
0 -
rex.hatt@webpros.com, with a cc to kyle.pinkley@webpros.com as he's our Zendesk guru.
I'll review those as soon as I can for you!
0 -
I confirmed we have the videos..............and our Zendesk manager doesn't have any idea what this could be. Could you try doing the following from a clean/test browser and then sending that information to Kyle?
1 -
Rex, unfortunately I'm not sure how to manually trigger the issue. I simply have to remember to record the video. I was previously not aware of the HAR export, nice! Thank you for making me aware of that. I don't know why they don't just export it with a .json file extension, whatever.
I did set the clock on Windows to November to try to get the cookies to expire but it screwed with the TLS certificate. So the best/only question that currently comes to mind that I can ask is how long are the authentication cookies supposed to last before they expire? On a (very not) fun note: Gecko browsers don't delete expired cookies because Mozilla hates developers apparently. 🙄︀
So I'll try adjusting the clock in one more manual test if you guys can let me know. Otherwise I just need to remember to shoot the video and ensure that the network panel is set to persist logs across requests.
1 -
Sounds like a plan!
0
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
13 comments