BuzzerBeater Forums

I am going to outline here my current technical understanding of the state of the login problems. I do not pretend to have a complete understanding of their source. It is particularly difficult to deal with because none of the computers/browsers BBs have been able to get their hands on have this problem, so we can't really debug it in real time.

It is likely that the problem has something to do with cookies. Cookies are small pieces of information stored on your computer that we use to authenticate your connection with buzzerbeater, so we know that the information coming from your computer is you and not somebody else. In particular there is a cookie with the name .ASPXAUTH which needs to be saved by your browser in order to have your session authenticate and have you login. It seems there are some ways in which this cookie (and maybe one or two others) is not being saved by some browsers on some computers.

It is also possible that there are conflicts between different cookies and the different versions of the site, this is why we suggested people clear their cookies and try to start over from scratch. This has worked for some people but not all.

I have interacted with three people now who when they disabled anti-virus software on their machine they were able to login. This is because some anti virus software is overzealous about cookies and has some algorithm for detecting what is a "bad cookie" and what is an ok cookie, and for some unknown reason their algorithm doesn't like our cookie. The only reason to fear these cookies is because they allow us to track you the individual user as you move through the site. This is true, but we have to do this for a site like ours for which you need to be logged in. We don't want other users changing your teams tactics etc.

I have also spoken to, or heard about people for which the problem is browser dependent. Meaning when they switch to using firefox everything works great, but not so in IE or chrome or something. Maybe, and I can't really recall there are people for which it hasn't worked in firefox and has in IE or something. I'm not sure what to make of these problems. I know IE and firefox all have settings which control privacy and cookie storage, and so it is plausible that some configuration of these settings is blocking our cookies. If i understood better that this was the source of the problem, I could look into what algorithms IE/firefox/chrome use to detect what is an ok cookie and what isn't, and maybe figure out how to change the way we make cookies that would make it compatible with the default settings. There are definitely some settings that block all cookies entirely, and buzzerbeater is not compatible with those settings and we can't change it to make it compatible. You can find these settings in tool>internet options>privacy in IE for example.

There might be some firewalls or other software running on routers, particularly in large corporations which are actively filtering information that might block some cookies from working. I don't know of anything specifically, but people have reported problems at work on certain sites. We have lots of alternate URLs to use.. www.buzzerbeater.com, digitalfieldtheory.com, www2.buzzerbeater.org. so you can try those to get to the new site.

the old site is currently only at old.buzzerbeater.com. We need to take the old site down because we need to make some changes to the way we store our data etc, and we dont' want to make those changes in two places because it would be a massive job and a waste of our resources. So that is the reason for the push to make the new site work for everyone.

In the meantime while i continue to figure out what the root cause of all this is, we find that firefox seems to work the best. If people have information that would support or detract from any of these theories i would be interested to hear about them.

in a related question, i am wondering if when people say they can't login, I am assuming they get this behavior where the page just looks like it refreshs and doesn't give them any error or anything.. like a whoops page, or an "invalid login" message. If that were the case, than the problem wouldn't have anything to do with cookies.

AVG antivirus is one of the program that i have seen affect cookies... i'm curious if there are more people with these problems with AVG, or what anti virus software they are running.

so i just worked with a user that was reporting that the new site wasn't working on chrome on his pc, but was working on firefox on his mac. I told him to try a new browser on his pc, he tried IE and it worked. Then he went back and tried chrome and it worked. He told me he hadn't actually tried chrome since we put the red box, we did change something about the way we handled cookies when we did that, in hopes that it would solve problems. I think the most likely explanation is that the change we made.. (namely just renaming what we called our ASP authentication cookie to something more standard) seemed to make the difference for him.

so the lesson is, in solving a problem, the first step is always to reproduce it.

here are the standard set of questions i am trying to get users to answer. Its especially frustrating when i get answers to only one of them, for instance "old.buzzerbeater.com works and buzzerbeater.com doesn't".

--
I am trying to help figure out what the problem is with some of the users, to do so, I need your help to answer some questions to help narrow down where the problem is. So if you could try these various things, and tell me what the result is, it will be of great assistance in diagnosing this problem, because we cannot manage to reproduce it on any of our computers.

1) try to log into the new site (www.buzzebeater.com) and the old site (old.buzzerbeater.com). Does one work? or both?

2) what browser and operating system are you using, please give the exact version. You can usually find this information in the menu of the program in something like help>about X, where X is your browser's name

3) try to log onto both sites on another computer. Ideally this should be a computer that is using the same internet connection as the one that is giving you problems. I am trying to understand if this problem is connection specific or computer specific. Does your ability to log into the old or new site change when you use a different computer. Please tell me whether a different computer works/doesn't work, and whether that computer was using a different connection to the internet or the same.

4) try to download and use a different browser than you are using. There are at least 4 different browsers to try.

Firefox (getfirefox.com)

IE (installed by default by microsoft on windows machines, though you can update it at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx

Opera (http://www.opera.com/)

Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome)

Does changing browsers let you login to either site that you weren't able to login before? Or maybe it makes you unable to login to one that you were able to before.

So i decided to try to figure out what are the reasons some browsers block some cookies. I stumbled upon some articles that suggest that some versions of IE block cookies from websites that don't have a privacy policy published... and by privacy policy I mean this odd assortment of 3 letter codes that don't mean anything to me...
"CP=\'IDC DSP COR ADM DEVi TAIi PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONi HIS OUR IND CNT\'")

you can read about all the glorious technical details here
http://aspnetresources.com/blog/frames_webforms_and_rejected_cookies.aspx

anyway, the bottom line is I have added this to our site now I believe, and I'm hoping this will let IE and other browsers accept our cookies and let people login... but i'm not sure cause I can't reproduce the problem myself, so i've sent out a lot of emails asking people if this has solved their problem and am waiting to hear back.

debugging this is slow going because of this time delay in feedback.

update:

So after posting in an asp.net forum about the problem, i got a helpful response suggesting that when a user has his or her date/time set incorrectly, it can cause some browsers to believe the cookie has expired and so fail to save it.

"We had a problem similar to yours and this was due to the date of the user's PC, when logging in to our application it creates a cookie with a lifetime of one day, users who had this problem had the date of the PC one or more days ahead, for this reason the cookie was not created, we solved this problem by increasing the lifetime of the cookie."

I have confirmed that having the date set incorrectly causes this problem in at least IE, and i have one user report that fixing their time zone allowed them to login with Chrome.

I hope there is more feedback so I can know whether this more generally what the problem is for most people.

so now i have gotten in some more reports, and definitely there are still others for which this explanation is not the entire explanation, because they say their date and times are correct but still can't login.

I wish i had a better way of assessing how many users this was really affecting in a dynamic way, so that I could track how big these various fixes are in fixing the problem.

Maybe a poll asking each user if he had an error while trying to log in???
It would appear in the first page after the log-in,the BuzzerBeater one...This could help you with this..I've seen use of this kind of servey in another browser based game and it was a success..

- - I wish i had a better way of assessing how many users this was really affecting in a dynamic way, so that I could track how big these various fixes are in fixing the problem.

In this context you do not talk about the problem that I always have when logging in and always have write my name and password twice to make it through and come in on the page?


Last edited by Unkel at 11/26/2009 11:14:14 AM

In this context you do not talk about the problem that I always have when logging in and always have write my name and password twice to make it through and come in on the page?

I don't have that problem here, but I do have it on eBay (only when using IE). It has something to do with cookies, but I have never taken the time to figure out what the problem is since I get in with the second attempt. So, perhaps it's a cookie thing for you, too.

Edit: probably --> perhaps

Last edited by GM-WallyOop at 11/28/2009 8:10:25 AM