Help logging in to edit MDN wiki pages

[Dave S]

Hello,

I have tried several times now to log in and edit the MDN wiki but
have been unable. It is quite frustrating. I am wondering if anyone
can tell me where I'm going wrong.

- I have created a BrowserID account, and can log in to https://browserid.org/
. If I visit https://developer.mozilla.org and sign in it also gives
me a popup window, as shown in the help docs. That window accepts my
BrowserID credentials and lets me sign in too.
- Once signed at developer.mozilla.org in I am taken to
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/users/browserid_register , where
it tells me "We couldn't find an MDN profile for your BrowserID. If
you're new here, you can pick a display name now and complete your
registration."
- I try to enter a display name and click 'Create a new profile', but
that takes me to an error page that says "Permission Denied". I will
paste the text at the bottom of this message [1].
- There are also 'Returning Members' and 'Forgotten your email?'
sections on the page, but trying either of those takes me to the same
error page.

I am using Firefox 11.0, but tried this a while back with v10 also.

Can anyone tell me what is going wrong? I just want to edit the MDN
wiki and help contribute.

Thanks,
Dave

--
[1]"Permission Denied

We're sorry, we're afraid we can't do that.

Log in to try again.
Register to edit docs and submit demos.
View demos or browse docs

No computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are
all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable
of error. So it can only be attributable to human error. If so, file a
bug for my human operators."

[Janet Swisher]

What user name did you try to use? FYI, spaces and special characters
are not allowed in the user name.

Do you have cookies or JavaScript disabled?

--Janet

> _______________________________________________
> dev-mdc mailing list
> dev...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-mdc

[Dave S]

Hey Janet, thanks for the reply.

>What user name did you try to use?
>FYI, spaces and special characters are not allowed

I made up a new username in the new member box. Should it matter what
I type there? I did not use any spaces or special characters.

>Do you have cookies or JavaScript disabled?

JavaScript is enabled. I have cookies enabled but set to not accept
cookies from third-party sites. Enabling that setting and trying again
still gets me the same message.


Does that help narrow anything down? Anything else I can do to help
troubleshoot this?

[Dave S]

Hey Janet,

>Cannot register a new username for my BrowserID
>at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/users/browserid_register

I solved it! I turned off my Firefox extensions and checked them one
by one. The culprit was RefControl ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/
), which was set to block the referrer. I added an exception for
developer.mozilla.org and everything worked just fine :)

Thanks for the help! Is there a good place to add a note about this so
future people don't get stuck?

Dave

[Burak Yiğit Kaya]

You should tell this to the Identity people(dev-identity) I guess. If you
don't have the time, I can do it for you.

Burak Yiğit "BYK" Kaya <http://byk.im>

[Janet Swisher]

> _______________________________________________
>

I had forwarded your email to dev-mdn, and was following this response
from Les:

> Do we have any idea what username he tried to use?
>
> That might be a red herring though: a duplicate username should have
> its own error and not Permission Denied.
>
> This sounds like a CSRF token error, most likely. Would be helpful to
> know if either JavaScript or cookies are disabled.

Les, does that help any?

--Janet

[Les Orchard]

On 4/3/12 1:00 PM, Janet Swisher wrote:

> On 4/2/12 9:54 PM, Dave S wrote:
>> Hey Janet, thanks for the reply.
>>
>>> What user name did you try to use?
>>> FYI, spaces and special characters are not allowed
>> I made up a new username in the new member box. Should it matter what
>> I type there? I did not use any spaces or special characters.

I wanted to see what the user name was, because:

* it might have collided with an already existing name, and the error
message itself was broken

* there might have been issues with the name that we hadn't previously
considered

So, I'd still like to know what the name was. Any information helps when
we don't have enough to know what happened.

>>> Do you have cookies or JavaScript disabled?
>> JavaScript is enabled. I have cookies enabled but set to not accept
>> cookies from third-party sites. Enabling that setting and trying again
>> still gets me the same message.

So, that's a stumper.

> Les, does that help any?

Not really. :/ still pretty stumped.

--
lorc...@mozilla.com
http://lmorchard.com
{web,mad,computer} scientist