New Posting Problem

[Bill Greenwood]

The new EAA does seem to work better than 365 did. I was almost getting comfortable with using it, despite me not generally trusting computers or them liking me.
But this morning, I wrote a response to a topic, perhaps 8 lines long and it would not post; said the "token" had expired, whatever that means.
My girlfriend knows a lot about computers,and never heard of this either.
Seems like, EAA or 365, one can't solve all the traps easily.

[Hal Bryan]

Sorry you ran into trouble, Bill - that's the first I've heard of anyone reporting that particular error. I've just done a little reading about it, and there are some potential causes on our side, but only if everyone is hitting it, which isn't the case. If it's isolated to a small number of users, vBulletin support suggests that there's some bad data in your browser's cache, or possibly your ISP's. Their recommendation is to clear the cache and try again. Here's a link to instructions on how to do that for various browsers - let me know if this resolves the problem:

http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser's-Cache

Thanks -

Hal

[Kamic]

Hal's solution should work as the probable cause is browser cache. As found on vbulletin's forum: https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/296967-Error-Security-token-was-missing-or-mismatched

[Mike M]

i appreciate the security systems we've got that require multiple logins to protect our privacy. what i don't understand is why i can't use my eaa login to comment on news article pages such as the one about the new government-funded diesel aircraft engine.

http://www.eaa.org/news/2011/2011-11-23_flatvee.asp

none of the login methods there are as secure as ours. i won't use google or facebook or yahoo because they have proved time and again they don't have any security.

hmmmm.

[Hal Bryan]

The original intent was to enable comments and feedback on our news stories by integrating them with the forums that were, at that time, on Oshkosh365. It was a feature we really wanted, but, the closer we looked, the more complex it became - in the end, it would have meant not only an extensive amount of work for our IT team (and a challenge to prioritize compared to their other assignments), it would have meant having to tie ourselves to the Oshkosh365 platform indefinitely.

Because of these things, the "commenting on news stories" feature had to be repeatedly postponed, until, one day, my boss and I decided to try an experiment with Facebook's commenting tool. The advantages were that it's free and that it took about 15 minutes to setup as opposed to x number of weeks / months to build something from scratch. The disadvantage was that, of course, not everyone uses Facebook or wants to - at the time, Facebook had about 400 million active users, though that number is more than 800 million - but the Facebook requirement is mitigated dramatically by the fact that you can login with Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail accounts instead if you so choose. In addition, for those with privacy concerns, it's quick and painless to create a free account on any of those services that doesn't share anything with anybody, beyond whatever name you choose to use.

So, we gave it a try, and the results strongly exceeded our expectations. Not only were people posting large numbers of comments on popular and / or controversial stories, the act of commenting meant they were sharing those stories with their friends, and the growth is exponential. At times, these tools help put EAA content in front of hundreds of thousands of additional readers. By way of comparison, our e-Hotline newsletter is mailed to about 110,000 people, so the benefits of friends telling friends is dramatic.

Is it an ideal setup? Absolutely not. We hate asking people to put up with different logins on different sites, and the fact that, for example, discussions on news stories aren't integrated with discussions here. But, for now, the benefits outweigh the frustrations.