Site logins should now linger a bit longer

Hello!

I'm posting real quick to let you know that Jason and I spent a few hours banging our heads together and seem to have implemented a new login process that is more secure than my original one AND capable of lasting more than 5 minutes. I'm going to call that a win.

It was important to me to make logins last longer than they had been, because having to sign in every time is a pain in the butt. Sometimes, I didn't want to bother, and that was making me less responsive than I try to be. So, this should help a bit with my responsiveness, and it should make continuing to contribute to the site a reasonably pleasant experience.

So you know, the new process should keep you logged in for a period of 1 month, unless you sign out of your account. After that, you'll need to sign in again. But you should be able to close your browser tab or window and return to the site without having to log in again.

As always, please let us know if this is not your experience, or if you run into account-related funkiness around the site. I don't think you will, but this is new ground and glitches happen. Thank you all for your continued support!

Jason

Cool! Thank you!

But I did run into some account-related funkiness. The site isn't letting me submit cover art. I added Bloodwash to the database and tried to submit cover art for it, but nothing's happening. It still shows the HG logo.

Not sure if related, but blogs look weird if not logged on now, and there's a "Invalid characterset or character set not supported" error at the top. Seem normal if you are logged on.

Thank you for the bug reports, both of you! There are apparently bits of legacy code in random places around the site's source code, and those features won't work as intended until I hunt them down and make updates to variables that reference the old code. It should be something I can fix on my own, and I'll try catch any broken things you all report.

Speaking of bug reports, just noticed that now, even when logged in, if I go to forums and choose the "see last posts" options, it doesn't include the threads started for specific reviews now and is just site announcements and games to be added to the database, so something happened so that all of the forum posts aren't appearing when you do that.

Thanks for the reminder on that. I noticed that before logins were improved, but hadn't gotten around to figuring out what changed and how to fix it. I'll add that to the list.

Joe, I believe artwork submission should be fine again. Your submission was on the server. A database entry simply wasn't being created. You can test it the next time you submit cover art and let me know if it's not working, but I think it's sorted.

The page listing the most recent 20 submissions should properly display feedback comments review posts have received. That bug appears to have been unrelated to the user account situation, but keep me informed if you see any related weirdness going forward.

I am fighting an overtaxed computer AND atypical network connectivity issues AND the site doesn't seem to be loading speedily for me at the moment (perhaps related to the other two issues) AND now I have some work responsibilities that will keep me tied up for a bit.

I did look into the charset issue on the blogs. I can't find what is causing it when my computer seems determined to fight me at nearly every click of the mouse. But it's on "the list" to fix eventually. If anyone encounters any other issues in the meantime, this should continue to be a great thread for reporting them in the short term. Thanks!

In that case, the auto-update for reviews being posted to twitter no longer seems to work.

Think that was going on for a while, maybe having to do with Twitter's API changes?

Yes, I think the site's new owner has tucked a number of features behind Twitter Blue, and he makes enough changes to the API that it's not worth sorting anything out until some of the dust settles. Posting a link should still fill out some of the details that make it look nicer, at least, and that's also true on Facebook. I'll probably remove the code for auto-posting if it continues to not work. Facebook changes too often to be useful, as well, and social media traffic to HG hasn't been great except in cases where a friend maybe ads a link to a conversation or something.