Site Registration Issues

General Site News22

We get about an email a day, from people who can’t seem to register for our site. Did any of our users ever have a problem trying to register, but figured out what the problem was and can now post? We aren’t the most tech savy bloggers, and don’t know exactly how to fix the issue. Any help from the SFN community would be a big help to those who can’t post.

About StateFans

'StateFansNation' is the shared profile used by any/all of the dozen or so authors that contribute to the blog. You may not always agree with us, but you will have little doubt about where we stand on most issues. Please follow us on Twitter and FaceBook

General Site News

22 Responses to Site Registration Issues

  1. EverettBeez 11/27/2007 at 12:53 PM #

    I had the computer remember my password. When I am not at this computer, I can’t remember the darn thing. When I ask word press to send me it too me, it never arrives. So I re registered. That password has yet to arrive. Pretty frustrating. I drove home to pass the H. Nutt news on to y’all. All four minutes it takes me when I actually stop at either of the two stop signs I pass through. Ah, small town life.

  2. Trip 11/27/2007 at 1:31 PM #

    I had issues registering, never receiving my password and I attempted on 2 different email accounts… (Hotmail and my NCSU student email) Then I got an idea to try registering on my Gmail email account and the password was sent immediately.

    It’s possible that some server-side filter on wordpress is blocking registrations from any hotmail/ncsu.edu email account — Although I have no idea why they’d block a .edu email account.

  3. package4 11/27/2007 at 2:12 PM #

    yeah, my gmail account just worked. it put the email in the Spam folder FYI

  4. ADVENTEROO 11/27/2007 at 2:19 PM #

    I had the SAME problems…I can NOT access my previous URL@SFN. I have requested NEW PASSWORDS several times…but they NEVER come to my email account…even though I have the CORRECT URL (User ID) and EMAIL account. I set up a GMAIL account and BINGO…I’m here. If WordPRESS would WORK PROPERLY…then they would PROBABLY have a MUCH SMALLER Data BASE and take up much LESS SERVER SPACE…

    GO PACK..

  5. spanky 11/27/2007 at 2:28 PM #

    Yes, gmail accounts work. I had tried with my ncsu e-mail account like Trip and wouldn’t send me anything… just created a gmail account and it sent it right away…

    BTW Trip, did you live in sullivan last year? (assuming you are current student)

  6. Trip 11/27/2007 at 3:07 PM #

    Lived in wolf village last year, off campus this year. Bowen hall for my first year… I believe my bathroom is bigger than my dorm room was in bowen, those are the freaking smallest rooms ever, especially the A/B/C rooms.

    It put it in my gmail spam account as well, but I made sure to check my spam folders on hotmail and I don’t filter my email on my ncsu account so they just never received any emails about my password.

  7. VaWolf82 11/27/2007 at 3:25 PM #

    I normally stay logged in at SFN. One evening, I found that I wasn’t logged in and could not sign in. I sent off an e-mail and went to bed. The next morning I rebooted (for other reasons) and had no trouble logging in when I came to SFN.

    Makes no sense to me….but that’s what happened.

  8. spanky 11/27/2007 at 3:42 PM #

    Just curious about the Sullivan thing. I had a suite mate who went by “Trip” last year.

  9. RAWFS 11/27/2007 at 3:47 PM #

    Hi Folks,

    Reading this entry took me a bit by surprise. I wasn’t aware of any problems with e-mail not getting towards the intended recipients when they tried to register.

    It’s not easy for me to get to the server’s logs from here at work, but I suspect that there may be a problem with spam filtering.

  10. JeremyH 11/27/2007 at 3:56 PM #

    Don’t know if related, but had an issue the last couple days that after I log in, it shows me as not logged in. I would go through another link to get to the page to go around this. For example instead of clicking ‘comments’ I would click ‘read more’ for the given article.

  11. RAWFS 11/27/2007 at 4:05 PM #

    Jeremy: try refreshing the page by hitting F5.

    “If WordPRESS would WORK PROPERLY…then they would PROBABLY have a MUCH SMALLER Data BASE and take up much LESS SERVER SPACE…”

    Sounds like a seasoned sysadmin to me. WordPress is great from a visual and user perspective but it can be a first-class SOB when it comes to bugs and operation.

    WP does have a hog of a database, it also locks records in one of the silliest ways I have ever seen and it also has some fairly strange PHP code too…but the darn thing is the blogging software of choice by a wide margin. IMO MoveableType and Drupal are far better choices, but that’s just me.

  12. WolfpackCoach21 11/27/2007 at 5:59 PM #

    Excellent entry SFN. After failed attempts with ncsu.edu and aol.com, I created a gmail account, and I finally received that coveted password.

    Looking forward to posting in the future.

  13. JimValvano 11/27/2007 at 6:12 PM #

    Jeremy and I have had the same problem. Whereas that had never happened before last week. I typically have to go back to the homepage in order to comment. I have tried refreshing…unsuccessfully.

  14. ncsuftw01 11/27/2007 at 7:10 PM #

    Yeah, road runner isn’t working either.

  15. VaWolf82 11/27/2007 at 7:45 PM #

    WP does have a hog of a database, it also locks records in one of the silliest ways I have ever seen and it also has some fairly strange PHP code too…but the darn thing is the blogging software of choice by a wide margin. IMO MoveableType and Drupal are far better choices, but that’s just me.

    If any of this is important, would someone please translate it into English for me? 😉

  16. tppack12 11/27/2007 at 8:05 PM #

    I just got the password at my gmail account. It would never send to my account ncsu.edu account. However, it was sent as SPAM in gmail.

  17. CaptainCraptacular 11/27/2007 at 8:28 PM #

    SFN, this is a spam issue. Your server has been blacklisted:

    http://cbl.abuseat.org/lookup.cgi?ip=208.64.29.42
    http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=208.64.29.42

    mail from SFN is not even getting to users mailboxes because most services subscribe to these blacklists and reject mails before they even are passed on to the regular users. This is probably also why its coming in to gmail labeled as spam.

  18. CaptainCraptacular 11/27/2007 at 8:33 PM #

    ^ I’ve never had to go through the process of getting de-listed before, so I cannot help much in that area, but there is a link to get started at the CBL page (the first link).

  19. paul 11/27/2007 at 11:48 PM #

    ^^ wow — very interesting.

  20. RAWFS 11/28/2007 at 12:05 PM #

    UPDATE –

    The IP has been listed because the old mail server sent out a malformed HELO, which was fixed during an update a couple of weeks ago. HELO responses are a key metric the RBL uses, apparently because spambots are not clean mail programs. Sometimes, misconfigured legit mailers do that, and SFN’s bottom end SMTP mailer was caught up like a dolphin the the tuna net. That doesn’t mean that this server or site ever sent spam, because it doesn’t and hasn’t and runs SELINUX anyway so there are no bots and no intrusions. We’ve requested it to be de-listed (it’s only on a few RBLs, not the whole set) and expect that to be finished sometime over the next week. The process is fairly rigorous and like the Captain, it was our first time dealing with them.

    It won’t matter anyway, because the IP address will be changing (the RBL lists by IP, not domain) as soon as atdn.net fixes a router table problem that has been putting the new server into a literal black hole for Road Runner customers.

    ATDN is the AOL Transit Data Network, which does IP traffic peering for Road Runner and other associated Time Warner properties. That was (supposedly) finished this morning, and as soon as we can traverse through the atdn.net backbone SFN and RAWFS will have new IP addresses — neither of which are on the RBL.

    On other fronts, the new server will have a fully updated LAMP back-end with a really quick database engine. WordPress is pretty demanding on the backend DB, as you guys have seen when there’s a lot of traffic here. Optimizing the old one and doing some other stuff mostly mitigated it, but at the end of the day, SFN’s load was just too much for the old system to handle and the new one is designed to carry about 3X what the average traffic peaks have presented…so far.

    Bottom line is that fixing this has kept me awake for roughly 30 straight hours, but that’s just the price a sysadmin pays when something goes wrong.

  21. gcpack 12/01/2007 at 3:00 PM #

    The seas have parted and after two years I finally have a password!! Silly that it took that long but only after getting a Gmail account and as Package4 said it went straight to the spam folder. Maybe the passwords always go to the spam folder of no matter where your email account is?

  22. DFMo 12/10/2007 at 2:56 PM #

    First timer …. So I waited it out rather than register under gmail. I had registered under nc.rr.com ages ago and just now tried a password reset AGAIN and it finally came over successfully (ok, so I am a little slow in getting back to this).

    nc.rr.com registrations should be ok now. I did not see a post that proclaimed as much.

Leave a Reply