Locked Out for a Week

Report · Dec 26, 2014

As of yesterday evening I was finally able to log in after having been locked out of these forums for upwards of a week.

During that time I tried several times to clear all Adobe and Jive cookies (which ultimately meant I needed to supply credentials to log into several other forums again as well). At this point I have coded a batch file that will find and delete cookies that contain the strings "Adobe" or "Jive". Why did I need to do that? To this day I've never needed to do so to continue to access ANY other forum.

I'm computer savvy; I know how to recover from problems. But I'm imagining mere mortals repeatedly getting those "There was an error" responses from their browser.

Does anyone care that the forum, where good, smart people help do Adobe's support job for free, basically doesn't work - locking people out essentially permanently?

-Noel

Report · Dec 26, 2014

Without access to the session chain there's no way to tell what was going on, but I've not seen reports of anyone else being blocked from access like that. Was the issue with the AdobeID login page or the forum itself? Where were the errors being shown and what did they say?

On a technical level the site only knows who you are via the cookies set by the AdobeID login system, so if you empty all your cookies then there's absolutely nothing left in the HTTP transaction that could identify you and prevent login - you should just see the site in guest mode like everyone else. It's possible that your IP was blacklisted or your ISP blocked this site, but very unlikely (we don't use IP blocking on here anymore except in very specific types of attack, and an ISP block usually redirects you to an explanatory page on their network).

Report · Dec 26, 2014

As the errors are not logged anywhere, the specifics are unfortunately gone. The general message was "Logon failed, try later". It looked like I was logged out and the failure occurred when I pressed the Sign On (or whatever the wording is) link. If I see it again I'll screen grab it.

Until I resurrected my "delete all Adobe and Jive cookies" script, I did not see a resolution. Even then I did not see success right away, as I must have had a remnant iexplore.exe process stay alive for a while.

But the specifics are inconsequential. I have a clean, well-maintained system and I use the most prevalent browser there is.

Adobe professes to be a leader in content creation.

No other web site I've ever been to has required me to code software to find and delete its cookies before it will work. None. And I've been online since there's been a line to be on.

It's a disgrace.

P.S., in case it's not painfully obvious - you've not seen reports of anyone else being blocked because those who were blocked probably still are and aren't able to post. Like I said, not everyone knows how to put together software to clear the right cookies, and it's not all that much fun to clear them all.

-Noel

Report · Dec 27, 2014

Noel Carboni wrote:

P.S., in case it's not painfully obvious - you've not seen reports of anyone else being blocked because those who were blocked probably still are and aren't able to post. Like I said, not everyone knows how to put together software to clear the right cookies, and it's not all that much fun to clear them all.

-Noel

In firefox you can search for your cookies:

Report · Dec 27, 2014

Noel, I have not been officially blocked, but I have experienced ungodly slow down and even timeouts.

Clearing cookies and caches has not helped.

The interesting thing is that many other sites are affected too. This has been going on since before I posted here after several hours of frustration: Glacial pace of this forum during the last several hours visible to others?

Facebook even slyly posted an apology by appending new messages to a four-year old thread. Recen post in that thread show that some users are still locked out:

More Details on Today's Outage

Most things on the Internet are still a mess.