Geeklog Forums

Hello,

I've been running a couple GL sites and have always had a bit of trouble trying to nail down precisely what to tell various members when they have trouble logging in/out or see strange website behavior.

While this is all obvious to programmers, it would be great to have a standard "document" which describes what "visitors/members" need to do to make the website behave correctly with their browser.

Here's a summary of what I've been able to track down so far. Using Internet Destroyer 6.x, these APPEAR to be key settings:

(Tools->Internet Options menu)

1) In 'current' versions of IE anyway, the "Privacy" level in the InternetZone needs to be set No Higher than the "Medium High" setting. Anything higher and you're unable to log in. (can't store/read cookies).

2) It seems that IE is frequently set up to "Never check for newer versions of changed pages" or "Every time you start internet explorer" (it caches pages and doesn't reload them). This needs to be set to check on "Every visit to the page", or possibly "Automatically". A key symptom here is if you've previously logged in and have the website "remember you", it can appear that you aren't able to log out. Also, as an admin, I was adding forums, but they weren't showing up.

3) Another option here is to have the member make the website a "Trusted Site", but you still have to disable page caching I think.

4) If the website's owner established a "compact privacy policy", whatever the steps are, then people with privacy level of "High" would work also.


So, again, I think it would be great to capture how a "vistor/member" should configure their browser to ensure that the website behaves. What would be even better is if we could provide a standard reference document that would help 'novice members' configure their browser on their own.

Sure would be great to not get email all the time from people insisting that the website is broken cause they can't log in.

In the mean time, I wrote an article with screen shots for (IE anyway) showing what to click if they have trouble logging in.

Cheers!
-Jeff

I'm dealing with a lot of novice users as well. I would love to see what you have created for your site, but you are not showing your url, so I'm asking...

I agree this would be a useful tool. If anyone else has tackled this type of issue, please let us know.

a quick tip for your users-- ctrl + F5 will not just refresh the page, but will reload it from the web rather than the cache... images and all. I believe that works for IE as well as Mozilla.

Sure, It's not real formal, but here's the website. See the login block on the left.

http://www.catalina320.org/

I've really come to think that the easiest way to get people logging in properly is to simply have them add your website as a Trusted site and ensure that they aren't caching pages (or that the browser uses an intellegent way of caching pages)