Wow! So hard to set up just to get in!

English
#1

I’m blown away by how hard it was to reset my password on the forum, because the old password suddenly didn’t work. Multiple dead ends. If it’s this hard to get my password reset through no fault of my own, what does that portend?

And furthermore, I had to pick “writer” I couldn’t pick “system” or something more appropriate. My apologies.

And then to be met with multiple languages. Don’t you think you could inquire of my language from my IP address? Or when you asked for my first and last name, maybe adding a language preference there would have been logical.

I’m in awe that you want to drive people away. I guess only the hardy get to this point.
Well, if that’s the intended triage, I guess I’ve made it.

After the forced password change, I log in and i’m redirected to a page whose url ends in a grayed out /edit. It asks my first and last name, then then offers the Submit button, which does absolutely nothing, so I’m stuck on the page. Super frustrating.

Exiting my firefox tab, I re-establish connection to documentfoundation.org proper and login. It says I need to change my password again. Huh! I change and it goes into a loop that won’t let me out of the change my password subsystem. Ok, I beginning to understand.

I close my tab and start over.

Next, I re-establish connection with documentfoundation.org and this time it shows me a list of forums. Am I happy yet? No, I’m still not happy.

I see multiple languages on multiple topics. I’m confused. What in the name of God is this? I can’t even read this. You mean I have to work with this kind of a page?? I start clicking icons in the upper right corner. Finally I hit something that elects English. That was lucky! (I guess you have to have some luck in this process. If you don’t have any luck this time around, just rinse and repeat and you might have some luck on a future round.)

I get to a “create a new topic,” but I can only select from LO subsystems. Not ideal. We’ll just see what happens. After all, I had to go through that gauntlet to get this far.

So would someone be so kind as to get this info to the right group? Obviously “writer” is not the right place! Again, my apologies. Please understand, I don’t have a choice here.

I am looking forward to settling into a standard question format. Future posts will do so, if at all possible.

Have a good day!

1 Like
#6

Logging in is a test.

2 Likes
#8

I dismissed the right “passwording” and then simply became @Grantler instead of @Grantler. Could not edit or work on @Grantler’s account and could not erase @Grantler’s account (sigh). Now starting again as erbsenzahl. So problem is “solved” - cheers!

#9

This is not the reason why. A new account @Grantler was created because the old one couldn’t be linked to Single Sign-On. See the aforementioned post .

No that’s not a fix, again please follow the instructions and get in touch with hostmaster so we can give you access to your account again. Starting fresh means no rights, no stats etc. And it also pollutes the user namespace and database.

Deletion isn’t the way to go either. We want to merge duplicates, both here and in the Single Sign-On backend.

#10

Thanks a lot to @guilhem. I wrote to hostmaster@documentfoundation.org hoping to really solve that problem… - Thanks again, cheers.

#13

Just wow. I am a techie, so have sympathy for the complexities of technology. But, surely, this is a text book case of how not to do a migration. It has taken me half an hour to find out how to recover my account. If you think too bad, should have reacted sooner, that is a community minimizing frame of mind. I never received any prior notice about this. I only luckily found a post on mail-archive.com directing me to the migration page. Suggestions:

  1. Automatically create accounts under the same email address in the new system. Why on earth was this not done. When I tried to log in, no account. Reset password, no account. I was then left with Googling to try and find out what had happened.

  2. Provide a link to the migration page Migration from AskBot on the current login page.

I have to wonder how many people who love and use Libreoffice, but are not techies, have lost their accounts for good. We need all the supporters possible.

Thanks for listening.

#14

Unfortunately AskLibO, Discourse, and the single sign-on platform have constraints, incl. username/email uniqueness, allowed characters in usernames, and email validation.

#15

Not sure I understand? My manual fix, once I found the migration post, was to create a new account in the new system with exactly the same email address. That worked fine. Couldn’t a script be written to do this for all of the old accounts that have not yet been migrated? If so, you could save a lot of old users a lot of grief.

#16

What if another user had claimed the username already? Or if the username contained was invalid for the authentication backend? Also AskBot didn’t validate email addresses and had no uniqueness garanties so we had accounts with username and/or email address collisions which have to be resolved in an adhoc way. The main difficulty is not that we were migrating the Q&A platform or authentication backend, but that we were consolidating the authentication system. Had a similar issue when we changed our wiki’s authentication system from a standalone internal backend to our single sign on system back in 2018.

Some, certainly. A lot? I’m not so sure. Before the migration we had a close look at usage patterns, and it turned out for the overwhelming majority of accounts the difference between creation and last seen dates didn’t exceed 3 months (>50% never even followed up after their question/post). This is still the case here AFAICT. And by the time we migrated most returning users had an SSO account already.

So provisioning accounts on the authentication portal would “only” benefit users who are trying to return after a long hiatus, missed the announcements (so typically didn’t log in during the 6 months preceding the migration), and didn’t have an SSO account in the first place. In theory everyone might return some day of course, but based on usage pattern this is unlikely. At the time we migrated we weighted the pros and cons and decided it was not worth provisioning all accounts with made-up usernames.

#17

Ok, I appreciate the thoughtful feedback. And I understand the weighted efficiency of the decision. Fwiw, in general, I’m wary about writing off minority cases when it comes to human beings. Then I think that edge cases should have a higher weight than math would suggest.

If, for example, 10% of people might have / will run into the frustrating issue I ran into, I would argue accounts for all email addresses should have been moved over.

If you think only 1%, maybe not.

Between 1% and 10%, I guess it is a judgment call. If 2%, or one person in 50, then personally I would have decided that is too many, and moved over accounts with the same email address. And then, at least, when they try their email address on the new login, they could have simply reset their password, instead of discovering that their account had apparently been deleted.

(There is a real possibility I missed a notification email. But I don’t think so. I don’t believe I ever heard about this migration until my account did not work today.)

#2

This was an announced change, see Migration from AskBot .

The interface language is chosen depending on your Browser language settings. Or are you talking about the questions themselves? Yes, the landing page could be improved, see the discussion at rdm#2952 (notes #67 to #72). In the meantime, you can mute the languages (categories) you don’t want to see in your own preferences. It’ll work as long as you’re logged in.

Might be doable, thanks for the suggestion. Not sure if we can make it propagate to other services though. Not worth the trouble if it only apply to discourse. That being said, it’ll only affect the interface, not the questions. So probably not what you want either.

Hitting the submit button does something, it… updates your profile :-). Where should it it redirect to? It makes no sense to redirect to AskLibO since our authentication system is used for many other services, too. You should see links to individual services at the bottom of the page, though.

I doubt you mean documentfoundation.org here… Perhaps https://auth.documentfoundation.org? That’s our authentication portal, it’s only used for authentication (by means of redirection) and doesn’t have much to show beyond a password changing form. The page isn’t asking you to change your password.

#3

One possible improvement would be to proceed with the authentication request after sign up. So that after account confirmation new users would be redirected back to the service they’re trying to log in to. They wouldn’t get the opportunity to centrally modify their account, but it’s arguably not so useful as a first step and they can always go back to the page later if desired.

Unfortunately, due to the way the system is built this is not a trivial change.

#4

Ideally, the Migration from Askbot should be linked from the hamburger, maybe in FAQ.
It took me about half an hour to get in trying different user names, email addresses and paste combinations and hunting through all the help. Finally by searching using Google (not my first choice of search engine) did I find that page telling me how to log in.
I like a puzzle as much as anyone answering on this forum but just finding how to log in was beginning to get a little frustrating.
Cheers, Al

#5

That’s a fair point, done — the FAQ doesn’t get a lot of visits but I guess every bit can help. Ouch sounds like you a really painful experience, sorry to hear; not sure when you logged in first but the aforementioned post wasn’t there during the first few hours following the switch (my bad for not writing it before hand). It’s since been pinned globally and also has a pinned duplicate in the #english category so I hope it’s better now. Since the beginning the about page contains other channels to reach out if desired.

That being said, 1/ it was an announced change; 2/ we had a 1y-long transition period where folks where routinely invited to test our Discourse instance (incl. its authentication backend); and 3/ during the last 2 months preceding the switch AskBot had a banner advertising the upcoming migration with a pointer to instructions to make it smooth. No matter how hard we’re trying to reach out, it’ll never be enough because most people only start reading when things break :-P. So in practice migrations are always painful, and for everyone involved. On the positive side, if I read things right the number of new accounts is on par with what we had with AskBot during the past couple of weeks.

#7

Thanks guilhem for adding link in FAQ. It was one of the first places I looked. Cheers, Al :smiley:

#12

I totally agree with the original post. Asking a question on a forum cannot be harder than solving the actual problem. You cannot spend half a day trying to figure out how to ask a question to solve another problem. I am not even sure how I got this to work…

#18

There is still Apache OpenOffice Community Forum - Apache OpenOffice Community Forum with well structured subforums and with latest topics

User community support forum for Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice and all the OpenOffice.org derivatives

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