21 Aug Login Problems?
There are some common problems that we seem to encounter when people complain to us that they can not login despite their best efforts. This article will cover a few of the most common reasons, and hope it will help our neighbors and website visitors. The advice below is not specific to our website – it can be applied with any website requiring a username and password to login, and to different browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer.
First, are you sure you are not logged in? On the top of the left column, above the Pittsboro weather and below the Beltie logo you will see one of these images:
 If you see this, you are NOT logged in. | or |  If you see this you ARE logged in. |
To login, enter your correct User Name and Password, and click the “Log in” button. (Please see 3.B. below!)
If you have problems logging in, read on:
1. Not “in any case”!
Passwords on any website are “case-sensitive”. This means that if you used upper- and lower-case letters in your password, you must enter the password with each letter in the same case you used when you defined it in the first place. On this website the username is also case-sensitive.
MAKE SURE YOUR CAPS LOCK IS NOT ON!
(There are “good” passwords and “bad” passwords. See this web page for advice about how to choose a “good” password.)
2. Senior moments
If you follow some sources’ advice about passwords, you’ll have different passwords for every site that needs a password. Unless you keep careful records, you may forget what passwords go where, and “remember” the wrong password for the site you’re trying to get into. The lesson here is: use the password you set up for the site where you’re trying to login and things will go much more smoothly.
On this website, you must use the username you chose when you registered. Neither your email address nor your own name will work–only the username you chose–and it, like your password, is case sensitive. If you cannot remember what username you chose, send an email to managers@fearringtonfha.org asking for your correct username.
3. Browser help (not!)
A. If you keep a browser window open to this site for a long period, your session may have timed out. Before attempting to access the Bulletin Board or any other FHA website page restricted to registered users, first refresh the page and then log in again. If you’ve already been rejected (e.g., “invalid token”) then use your browser’s back button to go back to the previous page, refresh it, and try again. (Sometimes when you go back, you will find that you are logged in after all–no need to log-in again.) This method has been validated on Chrome and Internet Explorer.
B. Most browsers can automatically fill in a password field once you’ve entered the login name (or username). A problem arises when the browser fills in a password that’s wrong for the site you’re visiting. So if you use the same username as a login name on different sites, but use different passwords for different sites, the browser may pick the wrong password for the site you’re visiting.
To see if this might be the case with you on our web site, please try the following:
- Make sure CapsLock is not set on your keyboard.
- Go to our home page http://www.fearringtonfha.org/
- Carefully type (or copy-and-paste) your username in the Username box, but don’t click anything else; leave the cursor at the end of your Username.
- Press the Tab key, which will skip to the password box AND highlight any password that’s there.
- Press the Delete (or “Del”) key, and completely clear the password box.
- Carefully type your password.
- Click the Login button.
Still stumped?
Try the “Forgot your password?” link. You will be prompted to enter your email address – it must correspond to the email on your login account – and you’ll be sent a long security code with a link to click to open the change-password page. Do not try to retype the code! Nobody gets it right! Instead, double-click the code to select it in the email, then type Ctrl-C to copy the code to the clipboard. Open the link in the email and put your cursor in the space provided for the security code and type Ctrl-V to paste the code into this field. (Be sure there are no space characters before or after the code!) Then follow the instructions to reset your password.
We can not read your password and tell you what it is, because passwords are stored in encrypted form on our web server.
If you need your password reset to something you know, or have problems not addressed above, please send an email with the password (if you want us to reset it) to help@fearringtonfha.org and we’ll try to get you logged in.