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Edit: New registrations are possible, but they need to be manually approved by a moderator within 16 days of account creation. They have been until now, so please remember the account name / email and password you used while signing up, and you should be able to log in after some time. Typically within a couple of days or, rarely, until now, after more than a week. If you can’t log in after 16 days, try to register again.
Forum emails are not being received by most email providers so you will likely not receive activation emails and other email notifications.
Note that almost no new registrations have occurred since the start of the bug, and almost none of the users I activated manually have actually logged in after that.
Most existing regular users also haven’t visited the forum since the bug appeared, probably because they haven’t been receiving email notifications about post replies, and they can’t, if they don’t know the email of a person on the forum, reset their password if they forgot it.
No new signup possible and new user accounts getting deleted
If users don’t activate their account within some 16 days after creating the account, and receiving their first activation email, the user is deleted: https://forum.awesystems.info/admin/logs/staff_action_logs?filters={“action_name”%3A"delete_user"%2C"action_id"%3A1}
You see the frequency of those logs increasing beginning September 2024. So an optimistic guess is that it has only been a problem since then and it “only” affected a large portion of the 15 people who had their accounts deleted in that way since then.
If you look at the list of new users that did survive since September, and were not created in the last 16 days, I count 3. 2 likely spam accounts, and one likely not. So that’s one new legitimate user since September, plus @JS_Brouillon who reached out that he didn’t receive an activation mail and I activated manually.
A temporary fix would be to not require account activation.
Not possible to change passwords
If you forgot your password and were logged out or switched devices you won’t be able to log back in. I don’t know my password so I am still using an old computer to visit this forum.
Email notifications not being received
Previously regular visitors to the forum haven’t been visiting. @rschmehl hasn’t visited the forum for 3 months for example. This might be due to this or the previous point.
Some users do receive emails still. @Tallak was able to create a new account for example using an email from his personal website. So it likely has to do with the email provider and how it handles incoming email. I haven’t received emails since August using Gmail so the problem might have started then, although I did turn off email notifications in my account at one point.
One guess I would have is that the website this forum is hosted on doesn’t have a valid certificate, resulting in both a majority of browsers not allowing you to visit the website, and (silently?) bounced emails.
I am not an admin so I can’t look into this further or fix it.
If I were an admin I would create a valid certificate and see if that fixes things. If it doesn’t I’d look into it further. Maybe I’d try to find the emails of the deleted users and reach out to them.
What email provider are you using and are you receiving emails from the forum? That might help troubleshooting.
Also, if you were unable to create an account, you can try again and hope a moderator sees you in this list and manually activates your account.
