Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

"They'll also be aware of some of the teething problems we've had."

i.e. The entire system has been irredeemably broken and nigh unusuable for nearly eight months and nothing has been done or said about it.

I'm afraid I'm not really ready to take it on trust that it suddenly works now. Certainly, for instance, if I go into "My Discussions" on the POV boards and look at threads I've posted in on the iPlayer messageboard every message in the thread remains marked as new - even if I was the last poster in the thread and I read it four seconds ago. Given this basic bug that has existed since the system's launch is still there you'll forgive me for being slightly skeptical that the problems are "ironed out".

Phazer

I think this is great news. The old accounts system was messy and - although it /was/ a unified login - it felt like your actions in different areas of the site were completely unrelated to each other. Hopefully these new accounts, and the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ's appretiation of their necessity, will allow us to have a truly unified login.

To me, this means a system where you truly feel logged in whenever you are, and where the site has a more consistent feel (like how blogs, programmes and news look similar but h2g2 doesn't).

Anyhow, positive development. Best of luck with it!

Great news. I got done yesterday when I posted on an iPlayer message board. Aside from the email confirmation, there was almost nothing to do!

There do seem to a be a few teething problems with migration, but after changing my email address, re-confirming it and refreshing this screen, I can finally post a comment.

What was the thought process behind creating a brand-new single sign-on system instead of allowing the ability to use openID / oAuth technologies to login and comment?

While I accept there are house rules to be obeyed, and the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ would like some sort of record of who's commenting, there are surely ways to do this. Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD could have permitted users to link up with their existing preferred authentication protocols (if any - including Facebook Connect) and let comments be shared across the Internet; widening debate and transparency.

Could this mean that we could opt for our customisations and locations to be stored as our Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD meaning we could access our customisations from anywhere? Thanks for updating us on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD, it's great seeing some unification on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Membership; I ended up creating a new account for each 'service' since there was no continuity and I never realised it was in anyway linked. Thanks.

I would definitely like to see services such as Facebook Connect added in the future.

Hello Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Internet Group. I've jest registered for a new Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ ID account and found the process painless and would encourage others to register or upgrade. The only moan would be when clicking on the confirmation email, the continue button at the bottom of the page takes you to an update page rather then than the 'continue with application' page. For a moment or too my application appeared to have fallen down a black hole and found myself wondering what to do next. I believe this could confuse people when registering for the first time and request whether this minor issue could be fixed or improved?

Just curious:

What when wrong when this new ID system 'escaped' a week or so back. True it did not work, but why? (by work I mean permit the post a comment box to appear.)

Also

I seem to be logged in twice, on both the old and the new system should this be possible?

"If you have more than one Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ membership..."

Is this linked to the users PC's IP address? Some household have more than one person living in them that post onto blogs, HYS etc; each with their own login and user-name. Has this been taken into account?

@rajesh_j

OpenID/OAuth does not replace a single-sign on system - but instead augments it. SSO allows you to log in once for a SSO domain with an account, and OpenID is a method of authenticating to that account.

I for one would like to see Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ supporting OpenID (v2) so that I can authenticate using a more secure X.509 certificate with my provider. There are other OpenID providers that support RSA SecurID tokens, and other methods.

#11. At 7:05pm on 29 Oct 2009, John_from_Hendon wrote:

"I seem to be logged in twice, on both the old and the new system should this be possible?"

Yes I think that is correct, because not all blogs etc. have been switched over to the new log-in system, so you need both.

Have you considered being either an OpenID provider or consumer?

Hi, I'm Simon Cross and I work with Karen on the team that builds Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD. Thanks for your comments so far - we're glad you like that its clearly a cross-bbc login system and should be an improvement over our creaky old one ;-)

There's been a few comments about things like OpenID and Facebook Connect. Rest assured we're working on a whole bunch of cool features, and once we've got the main rollout underway, we'll be able to update you as to what we're planning and what's coming soon.

Also, some people have asked about why we build a new system at all and why we're making people 'upgrade' to it. We'll be writing some more blog posts about this - but in essence we wanted a system capable of supporting massive increases in load, better security and something fit for the new social media landscape. Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD and the backend systems that power it have those capabilities. You'll see lots more cool personalisation features rolling out across the site over the next year.

This period of upgrading from the old system to Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD was going to be a little messy, but we're doing everything we can to make it work smoothly and seamlessly.

Ian and Karen:

Got a question for either you...Regarding the
transition to the New Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD...System...Is there going
to be an email address directly to the team, if any problems
occur....

Thanks,
Dennis

Since, I have the account and, I want to keep it as my
primary Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ item; Because, I have achieve many things on it...

=Dennis Junior=

"These should by now have been ironed out."

They're not ironed out. (See, e.g. Phazer's comment #2.)

I've lost count of the number of Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ people who have popped up in the blogs here telling us the the new messageboard/blog system is 'ready to roll' but failing to acknowledge or respond to the subsequent user bug reports.

Russ

P.S. I have had no problem with the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD.

@Russ we're doing all we can to respond to any bug reports or issues we get at the moment - especially during this rollout ;-)

Sometimes the core Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD system can be working, but the site you might be using may have a few issues. These could appear as if they're faults with Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD. However, in those cases we make sure the query is looked into and forwarded to the correct team. Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD is not just used for comments and messageboards but a whole host of other services as well, like Brain Test Britain: /labuk/experiments/braintestbritain

The size and complexity of the systems which together make up bbc.co.uk can't be underestimated, and issues can never be fully avoided. But we try where we can.

Glad you've had no problems btw!

Also @Dennis - yes, you can contact us using the details in the FAQ's: /users/help

Si.

They'll also be aware of some of the teething problems we've had. These should by now have been ironed out.

Far from it, I'm still getting the log in merry-go-round on the iPlayer MBs.

Egg

"@Russ we're doing all we can to respond to any bug reports or issues we get at the moment - especially during this rollout ;-)"

Then how come not one of the bugs apparent from the iPlayer message board appear to have been fixed in eight months while we've had My Discussions screens that don't work and endless infinite loops while trying to log in?

Creating an account was simple enough. Just glad I was quick enough to get the iD I wanted!

Testing to make sure I've done this properly.

And testing this one too

Simon, could the new Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD system limit user names to say 20 charters (including spaces), these hyped up egos that think they need something like "I'm the Dude that can - Err, well actually, I'm just an ego trip Dude!" (and that would be a mild example, I've seen some that extend to THREE text lines...) as a user name should just have they account nuked, a user name is not flipping easy on the posters ego and should not extend beyond the first line. [/rant]

Hi @The_Phazer, The guys who build the iPlayer messageboard have been looking into that. For most people (including me and most other people we've tested) its working fine. The complexity of the migration from one sign-in system to another means there may have been a limited number of accounts affected, but I have to defer to the messageboard teams on how it all works. As we've said, we're about to begin moving all our messageboards to Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD for login, so we'll be making very sure it works properly. It would be interesting to know if you have any similar issues on the Strictly Come Dancing messageboard as it runs on exactly the same system, and also uses BBD iD. Have a go and please let us know if you do have issues there too.

@Boilerplated - Names are limited to 50 characters at present. We're monitoring how people use the fields in the new system and we may make adjustments to this once we see how its being used.

"Hi @The_Phazer, The guys who build the iPlayer messageboard have been looking into that."
Really? And what exactly have they seen when they've been looking? Might we hope they venture beyond a purely observational phase sometime soon?

When is this little lot being 'rolled out'? Oh yes, Monday morning. No panic then.

Russ

I'm using the Strictly Board and have several problems.

The three minute timer doesn't count down and I have to refresh or try to post to see whether the time is up.

The name change doesn't work - but a poster worked out a way round that by using a link to last year's SCD board.

See message 11.
/dna/strictlycomedancing/F14713548?thread=6965181

My Discussion List is hopeless. I can't use it to find my last post.

Here is an example.

"Last contribution: 31 Oct 2009 at 1:33pm (38 Minutes Ago)
New posts: 9
Total posts:Latest post: 31 Oct 2009"

The 'Last Contribution' section and 'Latest Post' section both seem to refer to the same post. When I click on 'Last Post' I am usually (but not always) directed to the top post on the last page of the thread. Very occasionally I am taken to my last post - but that's very rare.

For the example given above I clicked on 'Latest Post' and it took me to the top of the last page of the thread - a post which was actually made on 30th October.

I hope it's a glitch - nobody needs a Discussion List to find the last post on a thread. What is helpful is to be able to find your own last post so that you can see any replies and continue with the discussion.

Oh, and one last thing, I had a year's worth of discussions on other boards but, shortly after using the SCD board, all but one of my discussions completely disappeared! For some reason just one discussion (on the Food Board) remained. I deleted that, just in case you wonder where it went.

I imagine some people won't be very pleased to lose their discussions - or was I just unlucky?

I hope this info is helpful.

#31. At 3:49pm on 31 Oct 2009, NickReynolds wrote:

"@boilerplated - some people enjoy the freedom to play around with their user names. As usual there's a balance to be struck."

Indeed, my real name isn't "Boilerplated", if you see what I mean! I have no problems with clever, unusual or just plain daft user names, it's the length of some of them...

Hi

A few regular users of the Chris Evans Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 2 blog are having trouble with their registrations this morning.

Can someone from the Interactive team please post on the blog how to complete registrations please.

Thank you.

Deevs

I'd also add that there's people having great problems logging onto the Radio 4 PM blog, as well as posts disappearing after they're posted, and users being logged out when they go from one thread to another.

Valid registration details copied across are then being rejected by the new id system. I am not alone in having had to create an entirely new id - and then have suffered the problems referred to in (34) not to mention having to go through pre-mod.

Karen (3), I'm afraid the situation has been far from seamless, at least as far as the PM Programme blog has been concerned. A number of people have found that when they've attempted to create their Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iDs, they're stuck in endless loops trying to log on. Even once you are able to log on, the blog itself is acting up in ways not seen since the blog went to the Moveable Type system a few years ago. People are having comments disappear instead of being posted, others are being told "You've already said that at post x" when trying to post comments for the first time, users are being logged off when navigating between threads, and attempts to log back on are only successful when you get so far, then click Back instead of Update.

To be frank, the system is a mess, and doesn't appear to have gone through full beta testing before rolling out live. Please fix this immediately, as it is severely hampering the flow of communication on the blog system.

Hi Guys, @Fearless Fred and others.

There have been some specific issues with only around two of the blogs - one of them being the PM blog.

The guys who run the blogs commenting have been hard at work, and the issues around login/register loops should have been resolved.

As for beta testing, we do test as much as we can. Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD has been live in use on several sites for around a year now, and we tested blog comments on six different blogs for over a week before this morning's rollout. Sometimes however, some things happen which just can't be caught in testing. We all came in really early this morning and we've been working hard on issues as they come up.

Things should now be settling down. Apologies if you were someone who had problems - please let us know if things degrade again as of now.

Thanks,

Si.

"The guys who build the iPlayer messageboard have been looking into that."

For eight to ten months with no word?

How long will the fix take? 1.3x10^23 years?

"For most people (including me and most other people we've tested) its working fine."

No, sorry - I can go and look at the discussions pages for other people on the iPlayer messageboard too, remember? It doesn't work for 100% of the posters I've checked. That would require a lottery winning level of statistical improbability.

As we've said, we're about to begin moving all our messageboards to Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD for login, so we'll be making very sure it works properly.

Well... no. Sorry, but if you were checking it worked properly you'd have rolled back to the old ID system months and months ago and stop breaking the iPlayer board.

"It would be interesting to know if you have any similar issues on the Strictly Come Dancing messageboard as it runs on exactly the same system, and also uses BBD iD."

As has been pointed out by jazz'n'jivebunny above, it happens to all posters on all boards that use the new ID system, because the new ID system does not work properly and is being rolled out despite major bugs that have been known for nearly a year and not even acknowledged, never mind fixed.

I would have said it was impossible to make dna a worse platform technically than it already was, but somehow this ID system managed it.

Phazer

"There have been some specific issues with only around two of the blogs - one of them being the PM blog."

Exactly the same issue has been happening to posters on the iPlayer messageboard since it adopted the new ID system, and complained about by many of us. So no, sorry, but it isn't. The infinite login loop is painfully familiar to most of us.

Please pull this system until it reaches pre-alpha status.

Phazer

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

Great to see this has gone live now

Excuse this posting, I'm just curious...

I'm logged in to SSO as "Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcup-and-Spoonwinner, Cheese Namer & Zaphodista)", and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD as "Peet the Sadly Truncated". The page is greeting me as the former; I just want to see what name is attached to the posting.

Hi @Peet, this is due to what we've explained here: /dna/h2g2/brunel/F77636?thread=7070303

In the top right of the page, you should see your Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD name. On this blog (which uses DNA to run its comments) it will use your DNA name, i.e. your long one. For Now.

Soon, as explained we'll begin making all the various systems use your Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD name - except in some special places like H2G2 where you'll be able to be known with an h2g2-specific suffix. This should allow you to still express yourself in the h2g2 world just as you do now.

Hope that makes sense,

Si.

Hello! so hows the weather where you are'

Now back to H2G2

After registering and following the link provided on the confirmation email, a page appears needing me to complete my postcode and country in which I live. I do not have a UK postcode as I live in France and the site won't accept my french postal code but does let me choose the country. How can I complete the registration so that I can use the services such as the Personality test as covered on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Breakfast this morning?

I too have tried to submit a postcode, and found that the site will not accept my Dutch Postcode. (Also in an effort to do the Personality test). Surely this is a result of an over site that needs to be addressed by the system managers?

Nick,

Just to let you know -- it hasn't. At least not so that I can submit my postcode successfully.

Nick, Sorry about that, I misread being as been.

A little aside, but I think I'm still on-topic...

When I first heard this change was in the offing, I grabbed a snapshot of the DNA "Who's Online" for future reference.

Just fyi, I finally got around to processing it, and I found that of the 1828 people logged on at around midday on that arbitrary day,

28 names would fail because they were too long, even though all the characters were allowed.

369 names would fail through disallowed characters, even though their length was 30 characters or fewer.

155 names would fail because they both used disallowed characters *and* were longer than 30 characters.

This totaled up to 552 active users out of 1828 (just over 30%) who were inconvenienced by the "upgrade". I'm only pointing this out because elseblog it was said that only a "miniscule" percentage of users would be negatively affected.

From a quick scan, the majority are falling foul of your omission of ", ', :, ;, (, ), ., !, ?, # and comma itself from the list of valid characters in a display name. Can you give us a sensible reason why you restricted these characters? "We didn't think of it" isn't a good reason, as anyone (even a humble user like myself) could have gone and actually looked at what characters were already in use...

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

I post on The Archers messageboard.

I re-registered a couple of weeks ago when I got into a tangle trying to upgrade to Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ ID and then had to go through pre-mod again (and lost 'my discussions')

This morning I signed in with no trouble but then found myself back in pre-mod yet again, with a new user number and 'my discussions' empty.

Am beginning to think I have been singled out for special treatment.

How can I take a step back and reclaim my identity?

I've just signed on to the new system and it asked me for my user name.

"That's alan gee", thought I. But no - my username is something else altogether. Alan gee was what used to be may board name (and still is) when it asked for my user name, it was actually asking for what used to be called my "nickname" (god knows why they called it a nickname), but I didn't realise this until too late.

I signed on to find what used to be my nickname is now my user name and my board name is still the same.

This has had unwanted results;

1. My old identity is consigned to history and I have a new number.

2. I'm on pre-mod and it sucks.

3. My "your discussions" list is reset to the new identity.

4. The only way I can get to my old discussions is to find an old post and click on my old name. This is OK today, but give it a week or longer and it's impractical.

5. I tried to re-register to get in under my old nickname/username and the system won't let me. I'm only allowed one identity from my email address, so I'm stuck.

So come on. How can I get my identity back so I cam take advantage of this "seamless" improvement you've dropped on us.

Is there a fix for the H2G2 posts in 'my discussions' being shown as unread even after reading?

why can i no longer delete my 'your discussions' on the archers message board via 'my space' on h2g2. worked before but now there seems to be no link between the two.am i fated to have all my 'your discussions' forever on show and available for any passing loony to use to their own ends.?

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

As a member of the 606 blog site, the new Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔiD system has been rolled out there this week and I seem to be stuck in the same 'time loop' as people above have commented. In pressing the 'update' button to supposedly seamlessly transfer my existing ID across, you just get the Update page back again ad infinitum and can progress no further, and certainly not to your member page to post articles.

I reset my password which it supposedly accepted and validated but again, won't let me sign in. It just comes up with an error message against user name and password but then doesn't give you a link or a clue how to fix it.

When I went to the old reset password page and went through the secret question page, it rejected both answers - when I'm confident that I do know when I was born and where!

In desperation, I created a new ID (sacrificing a user name I've used for quite some time) and again we get to the same 'Update' page, I get the same 'time loop' of the page just going back to the same Update page over and over again.

Short of being stuck in some ghastly parallel universe, I'm effectively stuck. Before anyone says it, I have posted to the membership email help twice now and got nothing back. Hence, in desperation, I'm posting here as it seems I can progress no further

Having a single sign on for the whole of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ site is great. Better still would be to see all my comments/ contibutions in one place. Even better still would be to link the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ ID to comment service like DISQUS so that others can follow my comments and also contribute.

Just found this post by Googling "DISQUS Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ ID". Agree with @martinrstone, would also be great to be able to connect the two (allows DISQUS users to "claim" comments made on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ blogs as part of their wider Internet blog activity).

#60. At 12:36pm on 19 Feb 2010, Tim Holden wrote:

"Just found this post by Googling "DISQUS Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ ID". Agree with @martinrstone, would also be great to be able to connect the two (allows DISQUS users to "claim" comments made on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ blogs as part of their wider Internet blog activity)."

Is your memory that bad? :-)

As for linking to your other online activities, remember that such linking can come back to bit, this sort of linking is generally advised against - for good reason!...

Canadian postcodes don't seem to be working either, or am I just doing it wrong (postcode is the same as area code, right?)

United States postcodes (I'm assuming that it's the UK version of ZIP codes) still don't work. Neither the 5 digit form or the 5+4 digit form work. Why hasn't this been fixed yet? Locking out the entire foreign reader base for five months isn't good for business and doesn't really demonstrate that you're actually 'fixing' these kind of problems.

I got it to work (eventually) but it certainly didn't work right away and I'm not sure what I did to get it to work.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

The contents of my 'sign in' boxes (user name, password) have always filled automatically for me for over five years. Today they didn't, and I can't get my machine to remember the settings. Has the cookie structure changed?

Russ

Hey Russ,

Yesterday we released an updated version of Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD. In this new version, some of the HTML node IDs and form field names have changed. So, your browser may not autofill the username and password.

Just sign in a few times in the new forms, and your browser will pick them up and remember them just like before.

However, we are planning future versions where we disable browser-autofill of all fields in Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD - this is to help with security on shared computers - imagine if you went to a library pc, started typing and the library browser auto-filled someone's username and password for you! == Bad.

Si.

Simon - thanks for telling us that the system has changed. I suggest it might help in the future if you could announce such things in advance rather than leaving users wondering what the hell is going on. I do accept, reluctantly, that future ID strategy will disable autofill on all fields for security reasons, although why responsible users should be inconvenienced because of the actions of careless ones is perhaps questionable.

I find that username autofill still works on some login screens, but not on others. I have tried filling in the new forms many times last night, but as yet there is no sign that the password 'remember me' function works, nor is it evident from your reply whether you intend that particular 'remember me' function to work. If you do not intend that 'remember me' function to work, then you should not be offering that dialogue box, nor would it seem there to be any point in issuing a cookie at all, assuming that username suggestion relies on IP detection. If you intend that the 'remember me' function should work only after "a few times", then you should quantify what you mean by "a few times". I suspect that the operation you currently intend may not depend on how many times the users tries the remember me functionality, but in fact depends on a complicated sequence of timing and status correlations within the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ servers across the current multiplicity of current login processes.

Unfortunately, the login correlation status across the various systems appears to be going from bad to worse, and where erroneous login refusals are now appearing. The only credible item being reported on the login refusal screens is that "there seems to be a problem"!

At the moment, I am completely confused, and the current situation is one of the blind leading the blind.

Russ

Just experiencing a very weird thing when in logged-in state. At the top right-hand of the page, there is usually 'Russ | Settings | Sign out'.

Currently, each time I refresh this page, I get different names instead of my own.

Russ

Further to my #72, I cleared my cache and all cookies, ran scans (clean), but I can't replicate the phenomenon. Must have been one of those strange glitches.

Russ

I tried to log in via this blog and got the following page message:

"No destination page set - You have arrived at Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD but the page you came from didn't tell us where to send you back to. That information is needed to continue. Please use your browser's Back button to return to the previous page."

????

Russ

P.S. The 'preview' button now seems to have disappeared.

I don't know very much about the old and new system, although I did log in while I was trying to figure out what was going on, and I am now logged in.

What is going on is that I had Radio 3 playing this morning via the iPlayer, and just before 6 pm British time I tried to switch to Radio 4 for the six o'clock news. I got a message telling me that Radio 4 was unnavailable at this time. I tried longwave and the same thing happened. Later on in the afternoon New York time I got the same message on all the radio links, live and on demand. I got the World Service via RealPlayer. Later on I was able to get the midnight news from Radio 4 on the Beta iPlayer, but I can't get anything live and I can't get Radio 3. Now, many of us will be wanting to listen to the Proms and it doesn't look like we will be able to. What is worse is that there has been no announcement or explanation as to why this is. One minute everything worked, the next minute nothing worked.

You can see that this goes beyond being logged in or out of anything, and this is the functionality of the entire system. It seems as though somebody just pulled the plug on the entire iPlayer streaming of radio programmes outside the UK. This is very frustrating and destroys any confidence that people might have in the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ and its services. Remember there are a lot of British people who rely on these, people who don't mind if they can't watch Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ television but want to at least listen to the main radio networks. I have deleted my browsing history, did a disk cleanup, and all the usual things, but have been unable to listen to iPlayer for around twelve hours now, and nothing on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ News web site, Guardian online, or anything else which would I hope tell me if there had been some sort of technical malfunction or am unofficial strike, or that the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ had shut down its iPlayer feeds. This does not make any of you look good!

Christopher
Christopher Hobe Morrison
cmorrison5_at_hvc.rr.com