trouble with site

eliot feldman wrote:

trouble with site

I have been having all sorts of trouble I switched to google chrome , and now it seems to work.

I assume these are issues using the old legacy forums? They do not have a registration system and all information about you, your profile, email, password, and preferences are stored in "cookies" which are little files the browser stores on your computer. Cookies written while using one browser cannot be read or altered by another web browser on your system. IOW, all cookies are specific to a web browser, and in some cases even a user profile on the browser.

Moreover,  most now use more than one device to access the forums, which means for example, the cookies used by Chrome on someone's PC are separate from the cookies used by Chrome on their tablet. And the same applies to every browser on every device someone uses. And if they "clear the cache" on a browser on a specific device they use, all these cookies get erased if part of the clearing process is deleting cookies, which is usually the default setting when this is done. And then it's back to square one, where everything reverts back to the system defaults and the preferences, profiles, passwords, etc. all have to be manually entered again. And to further complicate things, all browsers have features, separate from cookies, that try to be helpful by automatically filling in things like names and passwords, and again, these are dependent on the specific browser and the device(s) it is installed on.

And it gets even worse. Sometimes there are so many sites are writing cookies to your device that there are buffer overruns where the browser gets confused and everything goes tits up. This is why the advice for strange browser behavior is usually to "clear/flush your browser/cache" ...  meaning delete all the cookies.

Hope this clears some things up for whoever reads this. Basically, changing anything in the legacy forums means that same change has to be repeated on every browser on every device you use, and repeated whenever the cookies are deleted or get corrupted.

BTW, none of this is an issue with the new forums. Logging in as a user identifies you to the server, and it takes care of all this. IOW, it does not use cookies to retain forum preferences but stores it as part of your account on the server, so the forums work the same using any browser on any computer anywhere in the world.