Hi Everyone,
In the last few days I’ve had a couple of members email me about a new problem they encounter logging in to the site, where it first of all complains about “Unauthorised access”, makes you enter your login details a second time, then accepts it. It can do likewise when downloading videos.
As far as I know, nothing has changed on our end, so I’m puzzled why this has suddenly started happening. The two customers were both on Windows, but different versions, and different browsers.
Clearing browser cache worked for one customer, changing browser worked for the other.
My best guess is this is to do with stale login cookies. When you log in to the site, it puts a short, time-limited “this login is OK” cookie onto your machine, which is what stops you having to log in again every time you change page on the site. If something is messing up the site’s ability to put that cookie on your machine you could be left instead with an old one from a previous login. That would explain why you get challenged the first time as if your session has timed out.
It is an annoyance, sorry. I’ve raised it with our hosting company to see if we can figure out what’s happening. As always, it is hard to figure out intermittent problems. If it affects you, please try clearing cookies and your browser cache, make sure your antivirus or antispam isn’t blocking cookies from RestrainedElegance.com, and maybe try a different browser to see if the problem recurs.
If it is happening to you please could you mail me the details so we can try to figure out any common pattern? Please let me know the operating system, browser and antivirus package you are using to see if we can narrow it down?
Thanks and apologies for the inconvenience!
Hywel
The cookie thing was one of my first thoughts when I started have this trouble, so along with clearing cache I went and deleted cookies. Although I didn’t nuke all of them – just the ones that looked like they were associated with RE.
It didn’t help, but I might have missed an offending cookie. And just this morning, I’m able to log in without trouble. If it was an offending cookie that caused the problem, then it must have expired.
Anyway, the trouble I had was that the site would first appear to reject my login – but when I backed out of the 401 page and tried entering the site again, it let me in *without asking for a log-in* So if it’s cookies, the site set a “this login is OK” cookie that somehow didn’t get initially recognized.
I had this problem since the start of my subscription in December. At the beginning I had to re-enter the credentials for the videos (but not for photo-sets), but since some time in January it’s now happening for the login at the beginning (but not for the videos after that, anymore). Isn’t a big deal for me, so I didn’t bother.
I’m using an up-to-date Firefox at high privacy level and with uBlock origin add-in on Windows10 Pro 1909 64bit. No other anti-virus besides the integrated Windows Defender.
I hope you can figure something out.