We must maintain very tight security on our website because there are literally thousands of hackers we must filter out of our firewall who try to conduct hacking or denial service attacks on a constant basis. As a result, our website security settings are very tight and this can sometimes lead to inconvenience for our users. We discuss this on the “About->Website security*” page in our menus at the link below:
https://sedm.org/about/website-security/
1. Problems logging in because you didn’t complete the registration process
When you signup or register for a new account on our site using the Participate->Account Signup (free) menu item, you are send an email confirmation message containing a link that you must click on. If you never receive that confirmation email or do not click on the link, then the Account Signup process is never completed and our system AUTOMATICALLY deletes your registration. We get a lot of spam bots with fake registrations and we need to keep our user database clean and uncluttered. This is why we automatically delete unconfirmed Account Signups.
If you are a real person, then you should get the confirmation email. The only reason you wouldn’t is because it either went in your spam folder or you entered it wrong accidentally during registration. Therefore, be careful that you enter your email address carefully and accurately during the Account Signup process and check your spam queue immediately after Account Signup to make sure you respond to the Account Signup Confirmation email.
Those whose registrations have been deleted may think that the system locked them out, which is not true. Instead, their account was deleted. To fix this kind of problem, simply click on our Participate->Account Signup (free) menu item and reregister again and make sure that you complete the process by clicking on the email confirmation link. If your account was NOT automatically deleted because you didn’t complete the Account Signup confirmation link, then it will not let you complete this process because you will already have an account. This is how you can know that your account still exists.
2. Cause of Site Lockouts
Our site is setup to lock you out for any of the following reasons:
- You entered a non-existent username. This locks you out IMMEDIATELY.
- You entered the correct username but the wrong password three times or more in a row.
- You gave out your password to someone else and both you and the other person are trying to access the site at the same time with the same account. This is a HUGE no no, especially with Member Subscriptions.
Because of #1 above, you should be VERY careful in entering your username because if you are careless, such as using a touchscreen, you will be locked out for 24 hours! Some users have also been known to entirely forget their username or use a username from another site because they confused us with another site.
The most frequent causes of people being locked out are:
- They entered their NICKNAME instead of their USERNAME. People get these two things confused. The nickname is displayed in the upper right corner when you are logged in and it is usually set to your firstname, but this is NOT your USERNAME that you login with. Your username is accessible through your Profile Settings accessible from the upper right corner after logging in.
- Trying to login on a a cellphone where the reception is poor and not all characters are transmitted during login. Its best to ensure that you login from a computer through a landline to prevent this problem.
You can login to the site with EITHER your USERNAME or your EMAIL address. The safest way to ensure that you never get locked out is to login with your EMAIL address rather than your USERNAME. The email address will not display to other users, so you don’t have to worry about compromising your privacy by doing so. This approach will avoid the problem many people have with confusing their NICKNAME with their USERNAME and trying to login with their NICKNAME.
Lockouts are set to last 24 hours and then automatically expire, thus allowing you to login again without contacting us to unlock you. Resetting your password or having the system resend your password won’t remove the lockout.
3. You can login with your email address if you forgot your username
Some users forget their username and think they can’t login because of it. This is not entirely accurate. You can login with your email address instead of your username if you still remember your password. Even if you forgot your password but still have the email address, you can do a password reset to change your password.
4. Resetting Your Password
Be advised that if you request that the system send you your password because you forgot it, you may not receive the email if one of the following conditions exist:
- There is no account registered under your email address.
- You made a typo in the email address to send the password reset to.
- The registered email address is inaccessible because you no longer use that email provider. In this case, simply create a new account.
- You are using yahoo email. They commonly reject our email traffic. We mention this in our Support Page, section 10.2
- The email was sent through an email server or ISP IP address that is on our firewall blocking list because it has been conducting denial of service attacks on our website. See the About->Website Security* menu item for details. That page contains a Hackers Report that you can use to determine if the IP address is blocked by the firewall.
- There may be a technical issue on our site sending emails, such as the following previous issue:
https://sedm.org/forums/topic/site-email-and-password-reset-fixed/
If you are unable to get the password reset because of any of the above problems, you can submit a request to our Contact Us page to request a manual password reset as indicated later in section 5. Please use this option sparingly and be careful to write down your password to minimize the workload servicing this type of needless problem.
4. Working around lockouts
If you are locked out, then the easiest way to unlock yourself is to simply wait 24 hours and it will happen automatically. Some users who are in a bind and need immediate access restored and can’t wait 24 hours use our About->Contact menu to send us a contact message to ask to be manually unlocked. We can do this, but it can get really time consuming supporting this. Please therefore only entertain this option as a last resort.
Lockouts are based upon your IP address. The best way to work around a 24-hour temporary lockout WITHOUT asking us to manually unlock and WITHOUT waiting 24 hours is to use a DIFFERENT device that uses a DIFFERENT IP address until the 24 hour timer is up. That means, if your phone was locked out, use your computer, or vice versa. Note, however, that if your phone was using your local WIFI and shares the WIFI or you home network with your computer, this won’t solve a temporary lockout problem. You would have to turn off your phone WIFI after the lockout and login through the cell network instead in order for your IP address to change so that the lockout won’t affect your phone. We cover this at the link in the footer of the opening page (http://sedm.org) indicated also below:
CLICK HERE if you are having trouble accessing the site on some but not all of your internet devices
5. Contacting us about lockouts
Please be advised that our firewall can sometimes inadvertently filter out emails you send to us directly. Therefore, if you try to contact us by sending an email, it isn’t guaranteed to reach us and sometimes will not reach us.
The ONLY way to be SURE you can reach us is to use the About->Contact menu item and send a message through that interface. That method of contact is GUARANTEED to work.
Being locked out can sometimes mean that you have to do a password reset. In some cases, the reset email may not reach you. Usually this is because you are using Yahoo, which blocks most of our emails. If you are not using Yahoo, then it might be a technical issue on our site. For instance, on 10/22/2021, we fixed a problem with SMTP email delivery that had plagued us for a few months. That problem was causing password reset emails to not be properly delivered. See the link below for that announcement. You must be a Basic Member who is logged in to view it:
https://sedm.org/forums/topic/site-email-and-password-reset-fixed/
6. Preventing future problems of this nature in your case: Password Manager Programs
Lastly, we highly recommend that you use a password manager to prevent most of the problems on this page and save us a TON of time answering needless trouble calls by people who forgot their username and/or password or confused us with another site. We recommend Keepass, in case you are curious.