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Forum thread: activation code
| April Jones 03 July 2018 08:52 |
Hi, I am currently struggling to get past the first few stages to set up the system. I have created a teacher account but the authorisation code sent to me via email is saying it is not correct. I have tried both the code sent to the set up email and the code sent to the back up email, I therefore cannot access the account to begin setup. Any guidance would be appreciated! Thanks. |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 03 July 2018 13:34 |
Hello, I'm sorry to hear of this frustration. Hopefully some of the following will help get you there. Things to note: 1) Your Customer ID and Password (sent to you in the initial email) is ONLY used to access this website, eg to post on this Forum or to change notifications settings. Do not use it in your personal Cloud Server section. 2) The activation-code you need is sent by a separate email and is called an activation-code. The email gives a direct URL to enter your activation-code. When you enter your activation code you will set yourself a new password. (Check your junk box/spam folder in case you missed this subsequent email) 3) You may also get other emails of guidance - so please check your junk email box in case they've been filtered 4) The Cloud Server Tutorial (administrator start) near the top of https://www.stearsoft.co.uk/tutorials.php goes through the initial steps so might be helpful to watch (even if just the first bit to see this stage). 5) One of the emails you should have received as a customer using a Cloud Server gives a direct route to send an email reply for more individual support. It would appear the getting-started-process could be clearer, so if you are able to let me know which bit particularly caused confusion, I shall try and improve it. Yours, Marcus |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 05 July 2018 21:20 |
Thank you again for your post. Upon further investigation I found one issue that may have caused problems. This issue is now fixed. Some guidance has also been added on the activation page to try and help. If your activation-code still doesn't work, let me know and I'll generate and send a new one to you. Yours, Marcus |
| Tassos 01 October 2018 13:13 |
Hello, I have received my activation code for the requested test server and set the initial passoword. Due to MY fault I haven't set it correctly or cannot recall it(I've tried several combinations) so I can't login! Sorry if is mentioned somewhere (I've searched in forums and main pages) but I cannot find a way to reset the administrator password for my server nor, maybe, to request a new activation code (?). Can you please assist on this problem? Regards Tassos K. |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 01 October 2018 14:09 |
Hi, Thank you for your post and sorry to hear of your frustration. This is a situation that currently needs intervention from me (but see 3rd paragraph below). I have reset your account password. You should have received an email with new activation code by now. Once you add another (teacher) account you can use that account to reset the password yourself. The second account can even have the same email address so could purely be a second backup administrator account. One other thing that can help in these situations is trying to log in from a different computer in case too many failed attempts have temporarily blocked your computer... Yours, Marcus |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 01 October 2018 14:54 |
This is embarrassing. Sorry. I have investigated further on a hunch and it would appear that passwords including characters from the extended character set aren't being transferred and stored correctly. I will look into and resolve this as a matter of urgency. In the mean time, if you are able to set a password using regular characters (a-z,A-Z,0-9) it will get you started. I believe regular punctuation probably works, but extended characters like the UK pound sign do not. I'm really sorry for this. And thank you again for bringing this to my attention. Please do reply here, or directly to the setup email you received if you need me to reset your password again. Yours, Marcus |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 02 October 2018 23:08 |
OK. The bottom line is that there is a problem with how this is implemented in different web-browsers. The fix for STEARsoft will be to put a warning up when choosing a password to try and avoid it just mysteriously failing. In the mean-time, please just be self disciplined to only use characters from the basic ASCII character set (up to 127 in the ascii table). If you accidentally set an extended character password already (before reading this), then you might be able to log in by using Internet Explorer (or Edge). Then change your password so you can use other browsers too. If anyone is interested in more technical details read on... Extended characters in passwords actually work with STEARsoft when using Internet Explorer (though perhaps not beyond character 255). However what works in IE doesn't work in Chrome which encodes passwords containing extended character set characters in a different way. Opera uses yet another encoding scheme. For any technical coders reading this: IE just uses the 8-bit ASCII value so can go beyond 127 in the ASCII table - I'm not sure what happens beyond character value 255. Opera encodes characters to UTF-8 before proceeding. This is an elegant solution that supports all extended characters (but it's not consistent with IE). Chrome does something different to both Opera and IE - I've not worked out what it is, but it's different. This makes it practically impossible to support extended characters in passwords using the built-in web authentication mechanism. Only a HASH of the password is sent to and stored on the STEARsoft server, so unless multiple HASHes were sent it becomes impossible to predict which browser would always be used and therefore how to HASH a new password when it's being set... and if people changed from one browser to another it just wouldn't work at all. Hence the solution will be to gracefully limit which characters can be used so as to ensure all browsers work. |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 15 February 2019 13:04 |
Update: - I have re-enabled extended character set passwords (and just put up a warning that some browsers don't support this) - I have fixed some bugs relating to supporting extended character sets - I have enabled usernames to also allow extended character sets These updates are in the Cloud version of STEARsoft (version 7.2.8) Having reviewed use of other character sets, I hope these updates make STEARsoft more friendly to users without a UK keyboard using non-English languages. |
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