Question

I broke my account (JohnPrieur) and cannot use it and cannot delete or edit anything. I'm sending this request from new account (JohnRPrieur). Details

I attempted to Create personal sidebar. I'm new to TWiki, so I immediately wrecked my account by putting invalid HTML into the create-side-bar window. Now, I cannot use my TWiki account "JohnPrieur" at all. It only displays Welcome JohnPrieur in the upper left. It displays nothing in the central panel, and nothing I can use to re-edit or delete the stuff I put into the side-bar. I have created a new account "JohnRPrieur" just so I can send you this bug report. Also, I cannot even log into TWiki as a different user on my own PC (because it recognizes the machine I'm coming from) so I had to go to a different site to create this message and new account. I've tried deleting my cookies and cached internet files.

Suggested fix: short-term, please delete the corrupted "side-bar" contents from my JohnPrieur account so I can use it, and not clutter TWiki's database with an extra and unusable account. Suggested fix: long term, when inputting side-bar content from use, make sure its either non-destructive or put an emergency rescue link or button on the upper left that cannot be overwhealmed by corrupt side-bar content. Thanks. Further questions: john2000@cflPLEASENOSPAM.rr.com or JohnRPrieur

Environment

-- JohnPrieur - 21 Aug 2005

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

Work-Around Success: From my alternate account (JohnRPrieur) I copied the untainted contents of the side-bar. I then found and edited the side-bar topic belonging to my corrupt account (JohnPrieur). I pasted the untainted side-bar content, replacing all corrupt text, and saved it. Upon returning to my own PC, I brought up the now-fixed account (JohnPrieur) and confirmed that it works fine. This is just a work-around, not a fix.

-- JohnPrieur - 21 Aug 2005

Glad you could recover it. This is an extremely rare case, the first one with over 10K registrations on TWiki.org, so I do not intend to guard against this.

TWiki.org uses BasicAuthentication, that is, your browser remembers your login and submits the username and password silently in the background each time authentication is needed. You need to restart your browser to change the login name. In your case you could have restarted and login as TWikiGuest to fix your sidebar. I removed the extra account.

-- PeterThoeny - 22 Aug 2005

No, my username was somehow remembered by my PC and browser when I went to Twiki, even after multiple reboots of the PC. You must be storing something about my user or pc identity, not just the temp cookie in the browser.

-- JohnPrieur - 26 Aug 2005

TWiki remembers you also by IP address. Once you restart the browser you can login as a different user. Login is done by editing any topic, or by changing /view/ to /viewauth/ in the URL.

-- PeterThoeny - 26 Aug 2005