Why can't we just have separate log ins and be done with this nonsense?

[JayJhabrix]

As the topic says...

This common login is supposed to be one reason why Adobe can't implement NNTP. But what function does it serve? I've commented in another thread, and below is more or less, what i said there...

That, i think, was the most assinine idea anyone ever came up with. I see no reason for not having separate log ins for store and forums / downloads. In fact, i can't think of one good reason to combine the two.

If i were a user of the Adobe store, i would definitely prefer to have a separate login and password for that area. I think most people would. I see a lot of aliases in the forums. In the store, you'd want to use your real name for tax and audit purposes. Moreover, what's to stop people creating two identities anyway? So, the whole purpose of a common id is meaningless.

Am sure, that even at this stage, it wouldn't be too difficult to separate the two. For instance, whenever i open the forums i see a welcome at the top of the screen. Right above 'Home'. Yet, i still have to login to the forums... what give? Idiotic.

Adding to the above, doing away with this single log in would also mean an end to this frustration of suddenly getting logged off, randomly staying logged in, etc., etc.

[Scott Falkner]

There really should be laws against being this bucket stupid. Maybe now that Goob and Chaney are out...

[Phillip_M_Jones]

Claudio González wrote:

By the way, in those months I could also observe how the format of the Adobe Store site became more and more loaded with needless additions, like "fancy" gray backgrounds, large black boxes, and the like; and how many of these additions were carried over to "the other side". Which wouldn't have been so bad if loading times hadn't increased accordingly. My posts asking for the format of the new forums to be kept as simple as possible, though echoed by many, were also ignored, but then this is another story. Or is it?

I don't know if you remember Macromedia site. They tend to have dark grays, blacks and so on.

Makes you wonder if the takeover was Adobe over Macromedia, or Macromedia over Adobe.

There have been a lot of things that make it look as if, Macromedia tookover Adobe, and just used the Adobe name.

[Claudio_González1]

PjonesCET wrote:

Claudio González wrote:

By the way, in those months I could also observe how the format of the Adobe Store site became more and more loaded with needless additions, like "fancy" gray backgrounds, large black boxes, and the like; and how many of these additions were carried over to "the other side". Which wouldn't have been so bad if loading times hadn't increased accordingly. My posts asking for the format of the new forums to be kept as simple as possible, though echoed by many, were also ignored, but then this is another story. Or is it?

I don't know if you remember Macromedia site. They tend to have dark grays, blacks and so on.

Makes you wonder if the takeover was Adobe over Macromedia, or Macromedia over Adobe.

There have been a lot of things that make it look as if, Macromedia tookover Adobe, and just used the Adobe name.

PJ, what I was saying is precisely that the ex MM ("the other side") forums were gradually filled with more grays, blacks, and the like, following suite with the successive "embellishments" of the Adobe Store site, which now also takes ages to load. (*)

(*) Addition: about the same 15 seconds these forums take to download. Coincidence?

Message was edited by: Claudio González. Reason: addition.

[kanguyen]

The idea with having a single login between forums and the rest of Adobe.com was to provide a shared experience and tighter integration with other areas of the site. The points system is a good example of this - other community areas of Adobe.com leverage a points system for contribution/participation, and Adobe Forums are part of this overall program.

When we were on the old forums, Macromedia/Fusetalk forums the common Adobe ID account for your login and password. If you were on Web Crossing, you had a completely different login/password that was separate from the Macromedia forums or anything else on Adobe.com. It didn't make any sense from a customer perspective to have two different accounts to access Adobe Forums. I know there were many of you who stayed almost exclusively on one side of the fence (Fusetalk/WebCrossing) so this really didn't seem like an issue, but for the average customer looking for help, it was confusing for them to know which login to use.

The way WebCrossing accounts were managed was not ideal either - John had to manage lost passwords and general day-to-day account management himself. We had customers calling in asking for help logging in, and these would end up all going to John because they could not be managed like the rest of our Adobe.com accounts. Now - if you have trouble with your Adobe ID, you can reset your password or contact Customer Service for help. This removes an administrative burden from John and frees up his time to manage more important issues.

Eliminating this confusion with the login and then consolidating all the forums onto a singular platform were key parts of our recent forums project. That said, I acknowledge that especially for those who were primarily Web Crossing users, losing the permanent login was a big change. The login/timeout behavior is still not working consistently for everyone and it is something we are actively working on. I realize many of you are frustrated and rightly so when you are losing content while posting and getting timed out while actively using Forums. We are definitely experiencing some teething troubles now that we're tied into using the Adobe ID for login, but we will get that resolved so that it's working more consistently and we are working towards ways to extend the timeout without compromising security for other areas of Adobe.com that are more sensitive (like the Adobe Store).

Separating the login is not something we are currently considering. We've worked really hard to consolidate the accounts and all the forums together, and provide tighter integration with other areas of Adobe.com. The only analogy I can think of is that we really feel like you guys shouldn't have a dozen keys to get into a dozen doors, but that you should be able to use one key to get into Adobe regardless of which door or room you're going into.

Hope that helps!

[Phillip_M_Jones]

I don't necessarily want a shared experience. I don't want to log into Adobe.com (store) to gain access to to forums. the only time I need to log into adobe.com is if I am purchasing a product or downloading Flash player or some other player.

And because of all this mixing and mushing and such, I have two accounts, I only need one. The one I am using now. The other is tied to the old Macromedia account.

And after I am logged into Forum 20 minutes I am logged  out of adobe com in 20 minutes.

Also because of this I have to deal with login in every day sometimes two and three times a day.

Also because of this sometimes the counter doesn't have sense enough to know, I clicked on reply and after I construct a reply taking 10-20 minutes  to write,  especially in the Acrobat forum for Mac everything goes poof and receive a nasty message you are no permitted to post in this forum at this time. Turns out I've been logged out.

The least you can do is have some code that notices click of reply and suspends log out until about 30 seconds to a minute after the post command has been clicked.

Then someone won't swear at the computer and throw against wall after spending time constructing an answer and all is lost.

And who's to say because you have a different login server for each that two department have to handle, one department can handle two.

I understand your corporate logic in your reply . But you (adobe) don't understand our customer logic wanting them un-tied. We feel if they were separated some of our problems with the forums might disappear

[Claudio_González1]

Thank you, Kanguyen, for your detailed explanation.

I agree that having a single loging procedure for all the forums was logic and necessary. However, I still completely fail to understand the logic behind tying the Adobe Store and the Forums login procedures. By its very nature, the former needs strong security measures that are not only unnecessary, but also completely absurd in a public forum. I gladly accept being logged out of my bank account and of the  Adobe Store after a fixed period of inactivity. However, I see no reason for, and strongly object to, being logged out of any public forum after any period of time.

The cherry of the pie is that the present version of these forums was forced upon us, ignoring most if not all of its users's suggestions, when it was still very far from being fully functional. So, at present, we are not only logged out without need, but also unpredictably, at any time, and even while  fully active.

If this was the only problem of this uncooked nightmare...

[Kath-H]

Thank you Kanguyen - especially for not talking down.

However, what I would like is to be permanently logged in to the forums - and from more than one computer, as I was in the 'olden' days. I have no problem at all being asked to log in again if I go to any area of adobe.com which needs more security. Amazon can do it

I'm sure everyone appreciates all the work that has been put into this, but I still feel that the time will come when it has to be acknowledged that this system just isn't going to work. I suppose it depends on how much Adobe cares about the valuable contributors who have left or will leave, with the consequent major hit for the customer support services, who will have to try to pick up the slack of people needing help.

[Guest]

Ms Nguyen

All your lengthy explanation does is to repeat what we have told before and to re-iterate that Adobe has made a decision, guided by reasonable motives but not properly thought out, that has alienated the majority of frequent posters who use the web interface.

And of course in a separate issue you have alienated NNTP users completely.

Well done Adobe, you are maintaining your abysmal standards in customer relations.

[Guest]

The idea with having a single login between forums and the rest of Adobe.com was to provide a shared experience and tighter integration with other areas of the site.

don't want or need. as phil said. want to tie everything together? fine. just don't include THE STORE with that.

John had to manage lost passwords and general day-to-day account management himself. We had customers calling in asking for help logging in, and these would end up all going to John because they could not be managed like the rest of our Adobe.com accounts. Now - if you have trouble with your Adobe ID, you can reset your password or contact Customer Service for help

that's an internal training issue. are you trying to say it's easier to revamp the entire forum than it would have been to allow your phone reps to log into your site and reset passwords? please don't. i have a help desk 10 feet from me. they do it all the time when the automated reset systems fail. across  multiple platforms.

Separating the login is not something we are currently considering.

fair enough. at least that's clear.thank you.

john's post above was correct.

All your lengthy explanation does is to repeat what we have told before and to re-iterate that Adobe has made a decision, guided by reasonable motives but not properly thought out, that has alienated the majority of frequent posters who use the web interface.

And of course in a separate issue you have alienated NNTP users completely.

[Jochem van Dieten]

JayJhabrix wrote on 2009-05-24 08:05:

This common login is supposed to be one reason why Adobe can't implement NNTP. But what function does it serve?

It reduces the number of accounts people have to remember. I am very

glad I do not have to have separate accounts for the Adobe site, the

WebX forums, the Fusetalk forums, the Acrobat.com site, the

Photoshop.com site, the trainers portal, the Community portal, the

Partner portal etc.

I remember the days those were all different accounts and I am glad they

are gone. I can't wait until the prerelease site and the EDS site are

fixed to work with the Adobe ID as well.

Am sure, that even at this stage, it wouldn't be too difficult to separate the two.

Technically that isn't really difficult. It is about as difficult as

rewriting it from scratch to use proper, proven, cryptographically safe

protocols that allow for differentiating the login timeout between

different areas of the site, allow for cascaded trust levels (because

you are logged in to the store and the store has high trust, you are

logged in to the forums, but the low trust forums don't log you in to

the high trust store), provide API access so we don't have to reverse

engineer HTML junk etc.

But separating them just isn't going to happen. And you know it isn't,

because it isn't a technical decision but a policy choice. So I would

very much appreciate if you stopped whining and detracting attention

from issues that do stand a chance of changing.

Jochem

--

Jochem van Dieten

http://jochem.vandieten.net/

[Kath-H]

Jochem, the only reason (IMO) people persist with what you rather offensively describe as whining is that separating the log-in/IDs is the only way less technically qualified people than you, know of that the problem might be solved.

I'm sure that people would quite happily live with a common ID - as long as they could have the 'levels of trust' you describe, so they could stay logged in to everything except the 'high trust' areas *all the time* - which is what the WebX people are used to.

It's a perfectly reasonable 'policy decision' - *providing the system can still work as people want and expect*.

If the policy cannot be satisfactorily implemented, there will inevitably be consequences that Adobe may, in the end, decide are not worth dealing with.

The real heavy lifters in the forums save Adobe a ton of money in terms of customer support. If the bean counters can count, eventually they will have to acknowledge that.

[Jochem van Dieten]

Kath-H wrote on 2009-05-26 06:54:

Jochem, the only reason (IMO) people persist with what you rather offensively describe as whining

I think I am being nice when I call it whining. Because the answer has

been given, and is just not accepted. All fine with me, continue all you

want about the subject for all I care, but opening thread after thread

on the topic so you negate any possible filter people may have to filter

out the messages and drown other topics in noise cold just as easily be

called sabotaging. Not to mention opening all the "free points" topics.

Jochem

--

Jochem van Dieten

http://jochem.vandieten.net/

[JayJhabrix]

jochemd wrote:

It reduces the number of accounts people have to remember. I am very

glad I do not have to have separate accounts for the Adobe site, the

WebX forums, the Fusetalk forums, the Acrobat.com site, the

Photoshop.com site, the trainers portal, the Community portal, the

Partner portal etc.

I remember the days those were all different accounts and I am glad they

are gone. I can't wait until the prerelease site and the EDS site are

fixed to work with the Adobe ID as well.

Well, that's a bit idiotic... i'd just use the same one for all and keep only critical ones, such as the store separate. Infact, that's what i do even now... irrespective of the forum, the login is virtually identical.

They could still have two ids. One for the store and one for everywhere else. In any case, my store id is different as it's tied to my accounts / tax info. Sure it's the same with most people. The tax part at least...

[Claudio_González1]

jochemd wrote:

JayJhabrix wrote on 2009-05-24 08:05:

This common login is supposed to be one reason why Adobe can't implement NNTP.  But what function does it serve?

It reduces the number of accounts people have to remember. I am very

glad I do not have to have separate accounts for the Adobe site, the

WebX forums, the Fusetalk forums, the Acrobat.com site, the

Photoshop.com site, the trainers portal, the Community portal, the

Partner portal etc.

I remember the days those were all different accounts and I am glad they

are gone. I can't wait until the prerelease site and the EDS site are

fixed to work with the Adobe ID as well.

In my reply to Kaguyen, I wrote:

I agree that having a single loging procedure for all the forums was logic and necessary. However, I still completely fail to understand the logic behind tying the Adobe Store and the Forums login procedures. By its very nature, the former needs strong security measures that are not only unnecessary, but also completely absurd in a public forum. I gladly accept being logged out of my bank account and of the  Adobe Store after a fixed period of inactivity. However, I see no reason for, and strongly object to, being logged out of any public forum after any period of time.

I would very much prefer remembering separate login data for each than been constantly logged out of the forums. Even more so as the login procedures currently in use were not tested properly before being implemented, and logouts occur unpredictably, including many cases where the user is active. Following your logic, why not have just one username and password for everything, including bank accounts, large stores such as Amazon, taxing purposes, etc?

But separating them just isn't going to happen. And you know it isn't,

because it isn't a technical decision but a policy choice. So I would

very much appreciate if you stopped whining and detracting attention

from issues that do stand a chance of changing.

Jochem

Now this is really a gem. I do hope you are not a member of the Adobe higher quarters, and that you are not officially speaking for Adobe, because a company that isn't able to recognize and correct a bad policy decision is doomed. Also, I hope you are willing to explain to us mere mortals which of the very many issues people are (in your words) whining about do stand a chance, however slight, of changing.

[Jochem van Dieten]

Claudio González wrote on 2009-05-26 16:19:

Also, I hope you are willing to explain to us mere mortals which of the very many issues people are (in your words) whining about do stand a chance, however slight, of changing.

Everything that isn't an intended consequence. Using the same account is

an intended goal. The speed issues aren't. Using points is an intended

goal. The absence of breadcrumbs isn't.

Jochem

--

Jochem van Dieten

http://jochem.vandieten.net/

[John T Smith]

About having different accounts and passwords...

I don't know about the Mac world, but in the Windoze world, I stopped worrying about that a long time ago

The current Norton Internet Security includes a password manager... I use one "strong" password to tell Norton I am me... and it manages an encrypted file of all of my login and password combinations for the sites I visit

For those not using Norton, there is http://www.roboform.com/download.html - Free version password manager allows 10 web sites or $29.95 unlimited

As that applies here... since it doesn't look like the Adobe process will be split, it would seem to me that a single password manager might be a good idea for anyone who visits a lot of sites that require logins

[Guest]

I think most people know about password managers.

They don't stop you getting logged out and, as far as I know, they don't log in for you.

So what's your point?

[Kath-H]

Or you could getamac with Keychain - but as JJ says, that's not the point.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

88 seconds just to get to this forum's main page, log in and get this reply editor to come up.

Definitely not worth it.

[Kath-H]

The tone there seemed to be that if there's a way to make NNTP or

similar option work, they will.

No, I didn't see that at all. Hopeful noises about some Air thing but all very vague, and Murray in particular getting more and more annoyed about the loss of NNTP. No-one mentioned getting NNTP to work. Confirmation that it's possible with the new forums, no reason offered from 'on high' about why they don't want to use it any more, except minor stuff like edits not being seen via NNTP, but that's always been the case.

I think these people were all from the Fusetalk side????

[Guest]

Kath-H wrote:

I think these people were all from the Fusetalk side????

They certainly mustered a mighty fine display of meaningless initials between them.

(Obviously need to confirm their status somehow.)

[Harbs.]

There were some serious issues brought up. Not being able to sync the

forums with the NNTP server is a very big issue. If NNTP will

broadcast all the spam and inappropriate posts which are deleted from

the forum, then they are correct and it should not be implemented!

They mentioned that they are working on that problem in regard to the

AIR app, and if it can be overcome with the AIR app, then it can

probably be overcome for NNTP as well.

As much as I want NNTP myself, if it's not done properly, it should

not be done at all!

There's a difference between edits not being seen on NNTP, and being

bombarded by all the garbage that's ever been written!

Harbs

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

Harbs. wrote:

…Not being able to sync the forums with the NNTP server is a very big issue. If NNTP will 

broadcast all the spam and inappropriate posts which are deleted from 

the forum, then they are correct and it should not be implemented! 

Harbs, this was definitely the case in the previous forums (both WebX and Fusetalk)!  There are many outrageously slanderous Adobe forum posts and even serious threats by at least one poster with a felony homicide record out there all over the Internet that had been deleted by Adobe forum hosts, sometimes almost immediately, but they had been broadcast anyway.

None of the edits ever were reflected on NNTP.

If I understand your position, then these forums should have never had NNTP support.  That is a position I also support.  I never used NNTP myself—ever.

EDIT:  As a matter of fact, I've been applauding Adobe's decision to drop NNTP support ever since it became known here.

Message was edited by: Ramón G Castañeda

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

In addition, the abuse of autoquotes in NNTP messages by the likes of Murray the Adobe Community Expert and others were a great source of annoyance and irritation to users of the web forums.

[JayJhabrix]

Ramón G Castañeda wrote:

In addition, the abuse of autoquotes in NNTP messages by the likes of Murray the Adobe Community Expert and others were a great source of annoyance and irritation to users of the web forums.

I'm glad you're speaking for yourself Ramón... as i and a lot of others far prefer the NNTP route. In fact a lot of very heavy contributors have dropped out just because of the lack of NNTP support. They just refuse to waste the time and undergo the pain that Web Forums entail.