Problem: Attempting to login to Small Wars Journal via http://smallwarsjournal.com/user with a valid username, you get an Access Denied message.
Cause: During the many backflips and reboots of our recent transition debacle, the user sessions tables got corrupted. We have corrected things on the server, but your browser is storing a cookie with the corrupted session information on it and impairing your login to a new, valid session.
Solution:
You can resolve this problem immediately for yourself by clearing the cookie for our site that remembers your session.
Caution - you probably want to clear ONLY the cookie for our specific site. That’s what the browser-specific instructions below describe. Browsers also offer you an option of clearing all cookies, that’s NOT recommended as it would effect sessions on other sites you probably want to keep. But it is players’ choice.
There are instructions here for how to do delete cookies for a variety of browsers. Specific instructions for the two browsers most commonly used on our site:
Firefox (recent)
To delete surgically for SWJ:
1) Go to Options (or Tools>Options depending on version) > Privacy tab > Remove Individual Cookies
2) select cookie for site smallwarsjournal.com
3) remove cookie
4) go back and login
NOT recommended but FYI: you could remove all cookies there or through the clear history options, but that would log you out of your other saved site, too.
Internet Explorer 8 and later
To delete surgically for SWJ:
1) Internet Options > General Tab > Browsing history section > Settings button
2) View files
3) Browse for a file with name cookie:yourwinlogin@smallwarsjournal.com
4) Delete that file
5) Go back to login
To delete all cookies, again NOT recommended, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278835
Other Info
We are looking for a fix that will not require any action on the user side. If we find one, the problem will be solved for all and we’ll take down this notice.
Cookies always raise privacy concerns. Our use of cookies is limited and responsible, and very internet-normal; you can review our Privacy Policy, but first please look at all the other cookies in your browser. We only store your login and session info to make it convenient for you to revisit the site, and only if cookie use is enabled in your browser through a setting you control and can readily opt out.