This is really starting to worry me!
By Andrew Heritage on Monday, 27 October 2014
Posted in Technical Issues
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Sorry but I'm starting to question if EasySocial is stable and reliable. There was an issue the other day where one of my profiles messed up the avatar lists (this is being looked at in another thread.) Today I find lots of users are having issues logging in. And now, I just saw a message on my dashboard page showing "There are no activities here yet" when I know there is a very large amount of activity that it should be showing me!

The history of my website is that it started with Communit Builder and went for 11 months on that with no issues, then I switched it to JomSocial and it ran for a few weeks on that with no issues but I decided that there were "design differences" between what I needed and what they claimed to do and in the end we agreed this was he case. At that point I switched to EasySocial and in the short time since running that there have been these login issues, me thinking (but rejecting) that some settings I thought I made at the back end seemed to "reset" by themselves, the recent profile issue with all my avatars being removed and lots of identical men in ties apperaing (two of which were marked as the default - how does that even get allowed in programing?) and today, seeing an empty stream when I know there are pages and pages of activity I should be seeing.

I am only just starting to build a community but I do need something I can rely on and trust and know will give my users a good and consistent experience and so far it is hard to see that
Hello Andrew,

What issues are you having with the login? I have never received any reports about issues logging into the site so far.
Mark
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Monday, 27 October 2014 23:32
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People are getting the "invalid token" type errors. I got three reports of this over the weekend plus one of your engineers who was looking into the issue of the changing avatar list said he could not log in to the front end (although that might be for other reasons, haven't checked.)

Anyway this morning I looked through the various existing posts on this issue and have made some of the suggeted configuration changes so am now waiting back from my users to hear if they can get in or not. My concern is that some users may just "give up" if they can't log in reliably and I never had anyone say they could not log in over the last 10 months or the system was running before we switched to ES

The news stream also concerns me. I see it is all there if I look at the back end plus if I use any of the filters on the front end then it shows things, but it was showing "nothing" on both my friends and even everyone. Both feeds have started showing everything correctly (since someone posted something I think.)

I appologise I may have over-reacted, but after just hearing that people were unable to log in and then finding my newsfeed empty, added to the "glitch" of the other day with the avatars, I'm sure you can understand my frustration!
Andrew Heritage
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Monday, 27 October 2014 23:45
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Hello Andrew,

Most of the time the "Invalid token" only happens when there is extensive caching on your site which also caches the token that is stored on the page. These tokens are extremely important to avoid CSRF attacks.

For instance, I could provide you a shortened link which actually deletes users on your site if you are logged in as the site admin but since the URL does not contain these tokens, it will reject them. EasySocial checks on these tokens heavily to avoid any CSRF attacks.

However, when caching comes into play, these tokens (may have already expired) but because the page is still cached by the system, these tokens are not replaced with new tokens. This is normally the case. In fact, this also happens with the core Joomla's login. If you try to idle on the page for more than x amount of time (depending on your session live time), you will hit invalid token errors as well
Mark
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Tuesday, 28 October 2014 00:28
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Ok in response, as far as I am aware I don't use "extensive caching" - just what I thought was standard way of doing things (I haven't installed any special caching addons etc.) I have changed from Progressive to Conservative caching today since I read that could cause the issue, so am waiting to here from users.

As far as the users experience, some have not logged in for a day or two, try to log in and straight away get the message. They wait half an hour sometimes and try again and still get the message.
Andrew Heritage
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Tuesday, 28 October 2014 00:41
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Hello Andrew,

Thanks for the heads up on this, let us know how this goes. If it happens again, try disabling the cache altogether because to be honest with you, the cache in Joomla wouldn't really be any help at all because you are dealing with very dynamic contents that changes every time especially on a social network. Enabling cache wouldn't really help at all
Mark
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Tuesday, 28 October 2014 00:56
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