h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There seems to be a bug that potentially blocks some researchers from logging into h2g2 (or BBC altogether) with BBCiD. It may have something to do with clicking on "remember me" at the sign in.

Yesterday and today, when I tried to log in from my computer at work, I seemed to be in some intermediary state of log in. This was the first time I'd signed in from this computer since clicking on "remember me" from my home one, which until just recently always did remember me anyway. Basically, I saw a front page that mostly looked like I was a new user except the bar that should have had that little blue icon with "my username| settings | sign out", or "[sign in] or register..." instead had that icon and "click here to complete registration". Clicking that only refreshed the page with no changes. Same with clicking on the Don't Panic image. There was no place to click to either sign in or out.

I did try deleting the cache and all cookies (and everything else I could using firefox 6.0), but that had no effect. I even reinstalled firefox. I even tried contacting someone through the help pages, but that method mentioned up front that one shouldn't expect a reply.

I finally managed to get in by clicking on "create a new account". This brought me to a page to confirm my settings. This would indicate that I was partially logged in since it recognized my account. That page had a link to sign out and after doing so, things are back to normal.

I'll be curious to see what happens when I get home and try to access the site from there.

Anyway, I wasn't the only person that experienced this. Vip mentioned he had a similar experience a few days ago. There very well could be many other researchers stuck in limbo out there as it was utterly frustrating to figure out how to get back in.

It happened to PedanticBarSteward only a few days ago. He was utterly frustrated, as he couldn't figure out what was wrong. He had tried to exchange his email address as well as correcting his birth date. From what I understood, he couldn't change the latter, although he's much older than his account thinks he is.

Thanks for letting us know. We'll report this.

You're welcome, and thank you.

Apparently there is a bug and a fix is in place to go live tomorrow. In the meantime, if you're aware of users having similar problems please ask them to log out by entering the follwing link in their address bar and clicking return:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/users/logout

They should then be able to login again without any further problems.

Will do.

I had no problem connecting with my home computer.