Forum: Login problem

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
21

For the “experts” on this board, this is the issue from what I can tell.

I’ve traced the redirect paths when logging into the Avast forum and no matter which link is used the final URL redirect always ends up “https://forum.avast.com/?nologin=1”.

This is the Avast forum login page.

What should happen as far as I can see is that this URL “https://id.avast.com/login?target=https%3A%2F%2Fforum.avast.com” should take the user to a LOGGED-IN forum page. If you notice -midnight’s attachment shows this URL (that in this case ends up hung).

For some reason it appears I’m getting redirected to this “https://forum.avast.com/?nologin=1” URL all the time which may be the problem.

I’ve shut-down cold and then rebooted which all you “experts” should know clears (flushes) the DNS cache. I’ve also done a reset of my ISP server to clear any possible DNS cache that might be there.

I’d like to know from anyone whether they also get redirected to this “https://forum.avast.com/?nologin=1” URL like in my case?

And if this is not the case for anyone else then why do I have this issue when others do not?

Using IE to click on the “login” tab in the Avast forum page appears to do absolutely nothing, it simply ends up on the same page and same “https://forum.avast.com/?nologin=1” URL.

Other browsers, Pale Moon, Firefox will actually be redirected to the page I’ve attached previously. Chrome appears to refresh the page but to the same “https://forum.avast.com/?nologin=1” URL web page as well.

I can only login using “privacy” browser options i.e. IE “InPrivate Browsing”, Chrome “Incongnito”, FF “New Private Window” etc. Doing this when I click on the “login” link it takes me to the “https://id.avast.com/?target=https%3A%2F%2Fforum.avast.com#login” URL which is the Avast login page and then when logging in I get directed to “https://forum.avast.com/” which is the forum.

Of course if I’m logged in to the forum (after using a “privacy” page" then all of these links go directly to the logged-in Avast forum, but if I’m not logged in then any of the regular browser windows (not “privacy” windows) fail to get me to the Avast forum in ALL browsers.

If I don’t use the “Privacy” browser settings all I get directed to is the “https://forum.avast.com/?nologin=1” URL repeatedly (which is where I start from) and never do reach the actual Avast LOGIN-PAGE. Again, as I’ve posted before I’ve tried disabling all add-ons that do any “blocking” in each of the 4 browsers which makes no difference.

I’ve used multiple ISP’s (high speed AT&T is my ISP, but also tried free dail-up ISP’s on more than one computer and using more than one OS and still get the same thing).

Anyone have any ideas.

22

I’m using Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Edge and IE all without any problems logging into the my.avast.com account.

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/screenshots/u/Lh/1445946426548-82053.png

The question is what are you using that’s blocking internet access ???
(Moderator assistance requested.)

23

I used to have this problem few months back where u have to do the steps mentioned in the 1st reply by stibi and the 1st screenshot from reply 15. I didn’t come across to the screenshot from reply 18. At present, that problem doesn’t come anymore. Back then, I cleared all the history files which includes browsing history, download history, cookies and other site and plugin data, cached images and files, passwords, autofill form data, and hosted app data from google chrome.

After that I did this https://www.whatsmydns.net/flush-dns.html#windows-vista-7 once done that, I turned off my modem for 30 seconds and turned back on and wait for couple of minutes. After that I came back to avast forum and that problem didn’t appear and at present doesn’t appear at all. I use broadband.

24

I can’t login in IE 11 because it shows has to have Java installed.

25

All the years on the forum and you don’t know the difference ::slight_smile:
Your pic shows you need java script turned on, this has nothing to do with the Java program which you don’t require.

See here https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/gp/howtoscript on how to enable javascript in IE

I only use IE as well as some other members that I know of and access to the Avast forum is not a problem.

26

Thank you for your post. I’ve been afraid that it was probably an Avast cookie problem. Probably all you had needed to do was clear the cookies actually.

I’ve wanted to avoid doing this because I have 154 different sites that depend upon cookie settings and I have to take many hours (probably at least 5-6 hours total) to establish these cookies all over again for websites that can manage to keep their cookies working unlike Avast obviously. Of course I invariably do not have the records to a large number of these sites which complicate the issue of getting back to where I was before even more. I had needed to do this one other time in the past many years ago and I’m pretty darn sure it was Avast cookies causing the problem at that time as well (can’t’ swear on it however) which is when I learned at that time what a huge problem it is for me to have to clear cookies. If I recall I was only using IE at the time and didn’t have the advantage of using FF which provides a built in way to clear website specific cookies that other browser do not provide.

Sadly it turns out that it is Avast cookies that have been causing the problems in IE, Chrome and FF. It would also be the case for Pale Moon (PM) as well except that in this case Avast in their infinite wisdom (sarcasm obviously) has decided not to support PM of which PM has thread topic on this subject in their forum. Isn’t it interesting that all 23 of my other forums manage to support PM, yet Avast can’t seem to manage to do this. In fact out of all the 154 membership sites I use ONLY AVAST cannot find a way to support Pale Moon!!! Flat out ridiculous if you ask me that it appears virtually everyone else has no problem with PM yet Avast does. >:( (if anyone is able to use the Avast forum with the PM browser please post here)

Fortunately, as I mentioned above, in the case of FF and PM these two browsers provide a way for the user to delete website specific cookies so it’s not necessary to clear all the cookies. Unfortunately in the case of PM it’s not supported anyway, but I went ahead and cleared the cookies just to check this out. That turns out in the end to have been the wrong thing to do since now of course I have to spend at least 5-6 hours total time dealing with the missing cookies that I need for a total of 154 membership websites. I’ve already spent well over 2½ hours re-establishing cookies in PM for the most used websites and will be dealing with the remaining websites for literally months as I run across them re-establishing cookies for these sites as well. And of course there are many websites that I no longer have a record of what their passwords are (i.e. 11 of the forums alone) so all of these sites have to have their passwords reset which takes even more time to deal with.

In the case of Chrome and IE these browsers do not provide a way to delete website specific cookies so in the case of these two browsers unless one wants to install an add-on to maintain website specific cookies all cookies have to be cleared to fix the problem that Avast has with their cookies in my case.

So since I’m using PM now instead of FF because of the direction FF is taking with their version 42+ I’m now having to deal with 154 websites that need the cookies that I unfortunately cleared and this includes 24 forums all of which with the exception of the Avast forum can apparently keep their forum cookies in working order.

In the case of the Avast forum they had 22 different cookies some of which were apparently causing the Avast login issues in my case. I now find that the Avast forum presently only needs actually 8 cookies and not 22 cookies so good old Avast is leaving all kinds of junk cookies behind that need to obviously be cleaned up. Oh and don’t tell me that it’s a matter of simply cookies getting “corrupted” which has nothing to do with Avast because I virtually never use Chrome and use IE even less yet all four of my browsers I tried had the same Avast cookie problem (well actually in the case of PM it’s also that the browser is not supported). Why do I have 22 Avast cookies which when deleted in FF (since FF is one browser that actually provides the user the ability to delete website specific cookies as a part of the browser) the FF browser then works fine with the Avast login. And why is the Avast login problem fixed when clearing cookies in the browsers I almost never use. OK, the Avast evangelists are going to argue otherwise, well all I can say is that out of 24 web-forums and out of another 130 more membership forums that all depend upon keeping the cookies maintained properly Avast is the ONLY ONE of all of these websites that has the problem and with all four of my browsers 2 of which I virtually never use. So when did these browser cookies get “corrupted” that I virtually never use if the cookie problem has nothing to do with Avast? And I would add if I recall correctly it has been Avast that has had this issue in the past while on the other hand again NONE of the well over 100 other membership websites I use has EVER had this kind of issue with cookies that I can recall. And as we can see Staticguy has apparently had the same problem as well, I can’t help but wonder if Staticguy has had any problems with any other membership websites that need cookies to work or does it only happen to involve Avast!!!

27

Just for your information CCleaner and WinPatrol are able to clear specific cookies, there are probably many more programs that have the same ability.

The Avast forum also only uses two cookies - avast.com and forum.avast.com

28

Your welcome lakrsrool. By the way, I forgot to mention in my previous post I even use CCleaner to make sure everything is cleaned out. As CraigB mentioned after that.

29

@CraigB,

I just logged in on IE11 without having to turn java script on.

30

Congratulations

So what did you do to fix the issue displayed in your prior pic?

31

@ lakrsrool
“In the case of Chrome and IE these browsers do not provide a way to delete website specific cookies so in the case of these two browsers unless one wants to install an add-on to maintain website specific cookies all cookies have to be cleared to fix the problem that Avast has with their cookies in my case.”
For Chrome, this statement isn’t true. you just need to learn to dig a little deeper into the settings:
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647

This may also hold true for IE but it’s not my default browser. :slight_smile:

32

I didn’t do anything to fix the issue. I just went to the forum and logged in.

33

So why couldn’t you log in before with IE “as you stated” and now you can.

34

Thanks for the tip, but I’m already aware of this in Chrome.

What I’m talking about is drilling down to the website specific cookies which Firefox is really good at. Check out the attachment and you can see that what FF provides is the ability to deal with just the Avast cookies out of the many 100’s of cookies in a typical list which is all that Chrome provides.

What I’ve done to fix Chrome so it does what FF already provides is install the add-on “Edit ThisCookie” which as you can see from the 2nd attachment now provides the ability to get website specific cookie information and apply whatever changes you might want.

As far as IE is concerned, while the browser doesn’t provide a list of cookies it does provide an extensive setting protocol to delete cookies including a check-box to keep cookies that apply to sites in your “favorites” settings so with this setting only cookies that do not apply to sites in “favorites” would be deleted so I could have removed the Avast forum from my favorites and then this would have allowed me to remove these cookies and still keep most if not all of my important cookies I need a lot (unfortunately in my hast I didn’t do that). Of course thanks to the Avast cookie problems I’ll be dealing for many months now as I run across them in regards to logins and security settings that were all in the cookies I had for the 154 sites that I need cookies for that are now gone in all four of my browsers unfortunately.

Apparently you’re using Chrome as your default, sorry but there are areas that Chrome cannot match Mozilla browsers (which includes not only Firefox but SeaMonkey and Pale Moon to some extent even though PM is now officially a “fork”, etc). For one thing the only way to get a “warning” message when closing multiple tab Chrome browsers (which as you know can be many tabs) is to install an add-on to do this (and this does not work well I might add anyway). So if you have a bunch of tabs and forget you wanted to address something, to bad, in Chrome it’s closed without any double-check warning for the user. And of course there is the cookie issue which also requires an add-on to drill down l like Mozilla browser can already. Another thing Chrome does not do for the user is to provide a way to clear Cache when exiting the browser like Mozilla browsers will do (for that matter IE will do this as well). Nope, once again you have to install an add-on to do this in Chrome which I had do by adding the “Click&Clean” add-on in Chrome to do this. Also the “element hiding” add-ons in Chrome do not work well and will generally often fail to work when initially loading the browser which in the case of Mozilla browsers and IE for that matter work flawlessly. I’ve also found that in some cases a few of the Chrome add-ons fail to load at all. Also the manner in which Chrome loads pages is not to my liking, Chrome will load in “chunks” (can’t recall off hand why that is but to put it simply it’s just the inherent way Chrome is built) while on the other hand Mozilla browsers (my Firefox and Pale Moon) will load pages all at once which I prefer and I would add by the time Chrome has finally loaded an entire page I find it clearly slower in the end than Firefox and especially in the case of Pale Moon which loads very quickly. Also as far as Pale Moon is concerned it is much more adaptable to user preferences, i.e. you can have the tabs at the top like all the other browsers do now (same as Chrome and Firefox etc now) or you can have the tabs lower and the address bar at the top (like it used to be for all browsers). Also for Pale Moon you have the choice to show the status bar which is nice because it provides the user with more progress information while loading pages. I could go on, but suffice to say I’m not that much of a Chrome fan, the one thing Chrome is good at are “Themes” which I guess is nice since I’ll have to admit I do like the theme I use for Chrome a little better than what I have in the other browsers. So I guess if aesthetics is your preference Chrome is nice but I’d have to think that functionality is more important overall of which Chrome in many respects simply can’t match Mozilla browsers.

35

Thanks Graig, I really appreciate your helpful input. I’ve ended up installing an add-on for Chrome (Edit ThisCookie) to do want I wanted with cookies in the future. This provides the ability to drill-down to site-specific cookies which is already native to Firefox in the first place. Unfortunately in my haste I’ve ended up deleting all cookies in my default Pale Moon browser because I wanted to make sure that it was true that Avast does not support Pale Moon so I ended up deleting all the cookies. Same thing for Chrome and IE, but I rarely use these browsers. Thankfully Firefox has the ability to drill-down to site-specific cookies so I’m all good with Firefox but I’m now using Pale Moon because of the direction Firefox is going as of version 42 which is becoming more and more like a clone of Chrome unfortunately. I will now be able to drill-down in FF (as before) as well as Chrome and will be able to delete just Avast cookies in the future when Avast does this again. As far as IE is concerned this browser has a protect “favorites” cookies setting so I can just remove the Avast forum from my favorites and deal with their cookies this way in IE. Unfortunately this time I didn’t think about doing this so I’ve lost all my cookie settings in IE as well as Chrome and Pale Moon which will cause me to need to be addressing logins and security settings for many months as I run across them (as was the case the last time this occurred). I’ve already spent over 2½ hours addressing some of the more important sites that need cookies set. Some of the security setting are very cumbersome where I have to have codes sent to me, also there are some sites that I either don’t have the passwords or ID’s for and in some cases resetting the passwords etc doesn’t even work so I cannot even get into these sites without signing up as another user and in some cases I really want to keep the userID already have but can’t do this. Very frustrating when sites do this like Avast does by not addressing their cookies responsibly. Well again, now I’ll be able to deal with it better, but that doesn’t help me in the situation I find myself now.

I’ve checked these apps out that you mentioned since at one time I was interested in being able to block all program updates (or at least warn me if this is occurring) and I’m not sure but MAYBE WinPatrol provides this.

Do you use either or both of these apps?

Do you know if WinPatrol has the ability to intercede when applications might attempt to auto-update?

I’ve had Avast set to not update, but sometimes Avast will ignore this setting. Also I do not want FF to update either, but I think at least FF honors settings that users have and do not just over-ride settings like Avast will do sometimes unfortunately. Avast will use the excuse that it involves a “security issue” when they will sometimes simply ignore user settings and do an upgrade regardless of what the user wants.

The Avast forum also only uses two cookies - avast.com and forum.avast.com

Well actually Firefox lists 8 cookies for the Avast forum:
Avast.com - locale2
Avast.com - IDT2
Avast.com - avastComGiCountry
forum.avast.com - forumavast.com
forum.avast.com - PHPSESSID
ui.ff.avast.com - userid
ui.ff.avast.com - userid
ui.ff.avast.com - userid

In the case of the Chrome add-on the last 3 cookies are broken down into more detail:
avast.com - s_fid
avast.com - s_nr2
avast.com - s_vi

Check out the attachments I posted in my reply to Bob regarding this.

Of course as I posted before, the Avast forum had 22 different cookies in FF when I checked before deleting them when FF (and all the other browsers) failed to allow me to login to the Avast forum. So clearly the was a lot of “junk” cookies left behind by the Avast forum, some of which most likely was causing my issue logging into the forum.

36

Not sure if ui.ff.avast.com is still valid, but it is present on mine.

There is another possible and that is id.avast.com and this is used when validating your forum and or my.avast.com (and a cookie for that) logon.

There is another for blog.avast.com, support.avast.com, store.avast.com, my.new.avast.com and press.avast.com.

Most of those are also session cookies only.

I use the firefox add-on CookieMonster to manage cookies - I block all 3rd party cookies - I specifically allow some cookies and that would include those sub-domains of avast.com. Other than that I usually allow session cookies, these get removed when the browser is closed.

37

@CraigB

This morning it didn’t show that I had to have Java Script turned on.

38

Before I deleted all the Avast cookies in FF to fix the forum login problem there were three instances of “ui.ff.avast.com” listed in FF.

After I deleted all the Avast cookies and logged into the Avast forum successfully finally I ended up with three more instances of this same cookie.

So it would appear that the Avast forum is currently adding these cookies.

As to the CookieMonster add-on, I totally agree that this is a very good add-on but I find that I can do most if not all that I would personally need out of CookieMonster just using what is already native to FF in regards to dealing with cookies.

Since you’re a FF user maybe you haven’t run across this: Go to “Tools” then go to “Page Info” (instead of going to “Option” were the “Show Cookies” option is located and probably where most users go), here you will find a plethora of information on the current webpage your on (more than any browsers provide that I’m aware of), now go to the “Security” tab where you’ll find a “View Cookies” button which provides the user the opportunity to remove the cookies that ONLY APPLY to the website you’re on. This is really all I need myself and as I’ve said I’m not aware of any other browser that goes to these links to provide the user the opportunity to see this much data about the current website being used as you’ll find in “Page Info”. As I said, I think most users will end up going from “Tools” > “Option” which is more typical of what you’ll find with other browsers, however in the case of FF this “Page Info” option is very helpful.

I have enjoyed FF for many many years and would have personally never change to Pale Moon if it wasn’t for the direction that Firefox is now heading as of version 42. As you probably already know as of Firefox 42, unsigned addons cannot be used in the standard release (and beta) builds of Firefox. Full stop. I’ve got a couple of add-ons I don’t expect much response from the developers and in the case of one of them I’ve used it for many years and it can’t be duplicated by any other currently available add-ons that I’m aware of. As I see it, at which time the FF customer base is unconditionally denied the ability to make their own respective decisions regarding what add-ons they are allowed to use then this becomes a potential deal breaker in my view as I would suspect is likely the case with a quit a few FF users besides myself. So as of version 40 I’m not accepting any more FF upgrades since Mozilla has revealed that it will deprecate support for its current add-ons and go the Chrome route thus essentially becoming more and more just another Chrome-clone sadly.

I’m currently very please with Pale Moon (the fact that Avast will not bother to support PM aside, which btw is the only website I’ve ran across so far that I’ve really got anything to complain about using PM) and find it very fast, dependable and efficient. Of course the future at some point maybe in question, but for now I’m very pleased. I personally find that other than FF, PM handles add-ons and provides much more advantages to the user than Chrome or IE for that matter.

39

I don’t need to go to the page info - I just look at CookieMonster - and it will show all avast related cookies.

Many topics relating to FF and unsigned add-ons in the general and this forum, which is why the AOS add-on has now been signed.

40

"Apparently you’re using Chrome as your default, sorry but there are areas that Chrome cannot match Mozilla browsers "
You’re entitled to your opinion even if I don’t happen to agree with it. :slight_smile:
(Please keep your reply short and sweet. :slight_smile: )