Re: Unable to access the Forum

[Hated Moron]

On 29/07/2022 17:46, Ian Adam wrote (cross-posted from the DIscussion Group):

I'm trying ao access the BBC Basic Forum on:
https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/forum/

On the page that comes up there is a yellow splash screen announcement and curiously says that the current date is Sunday 13 Feb 2022!

Not so curious, really. It's a screen shot, and that's when it was taken.

clicking on the 'Dismiss' button on the splash screen takes me to the Board Index page, but bypasses the login boxes.

I cannot reproduce that here. If I dismiss the splash screen, I get a banner across the top saying that I need to accept Cookies, and once I've done that I see the expected Register and Login buttons at the top-right.

I know that phpBB forums can sometimes get their Cookies in a Twist, so in case that's what is causing the problem I would suggest that you first click on Delete cookies (which you will find at the bottom-right) and then try again.

[Hated Moron]

On 30/07/2022 11:59, Ian Adam wrote:

Then, on impulse, I reopened it and activated Chrome (I normally use Firefox).
Chrome worked exactly as you described.

I can access the forum from Firefox perfectly well, indeed I don't see anything different from Chrome-based browsers like Edge. If I visit as a guest I see the Cookie banner at the top, and on agreeing to Cookies the Register and Login buttons are visible.

But of course it's possible that there is a subtle incompatibility that affects Firefox only in certain circumstances, such as particular screen resolutions or aspect ratios. If that's the case it could be because the forum is running a fairly old version of phpBB.

You may wonder why we don't update the forum to the latest version, but the reason is that updating phpBB requires administrative access to both the forum and the domain where it is hosted. Normally that wouldn't be an issue, because 99% of the time the admin will be the same, but not here.

For historical reasons this forum's admin has no access to the machine which hosts it, and the owner of the parent domain doesn't have administrative access to the forum. So that makes updating the forum all but impossible, sorry.