[support] drupal.org

[John Summerfield]

I suppose this is a kind of support matter....

I had some difficulties yesterday, trying to login to drupal.org.

Concurrently I was having difficulties with my computer, absolutely 
nothing to do with drupal.org, but exacerbating the first and adding 
greatly to my frustrations - I had three browsers open, each gobblihg 
over 1 Gbyte of memory and the system (Debian stable, HAH!) is often 
sleepy after waking from its hibernation, giving me response times of 
tens of minutes.

Drupal.org and I had different ideas about what my password is, so I 
followed the "forgotten password" routine.

I got the link, copied it to one of the sluggardly browsers (probably 
iceape aka seamonkey) and got the "this site is down for maintenance" 
message.

Later, I reloaded the page and tried to set a new password. After 
several iterations I still got a validation error from drupal.org. I did 
get a _warning_ (from the javascript) about a lack of diversity of 
symbols in the password, but on the basis that length is more important 
than diversity (and I have sufficient diversity), I don't believe that 
should be a problem.

There are no clear guidelines about what constitutes a secure password, 
but _I_ reckon 16 characters comprising a mix of numeric and alphabetic 
characters should do the trick. This, after all, isn't a bank! And, it 
has more diversity of alphanumeric characters than one of my former bank 
password has - five lower-case letters and three digits. I have also 
used a similar password for a major stockbroker.

I thought to use the contact form to report a problem, but there isn't 
one. Following the "Support" link, I found one to report "issues" to the 
web master. Following that, I get "Access denied

You are not authorized to access this page."


The summary:
while (true)
{
   I can't login because I apparently forgot my password.
   I can't reset my password because I only get validation errors when I try
   I can't report a problem through official channels because I cannot 
login.
}


Whether the problem wrt my password is resolved or not, there still 
remains the matter that an anonymous visitor cannot report a problem 
such as a broken link. First, they must register. I often report broken 
links, and have already reported on this morning, but there is no 
likelihood I would go through Drupal's registration process just to do so.

I don't even do capchas, and I'm fairly reluctant to use forms either, 
see the contact link at http://js.id.au/register.php for my preferred way.



-- 


John Summerfield