Are you seeing a "Validation Error" message?

With some help from Firehopper, we made some progress on the issue. I am documenting it here so that others can try this workaround if it happens to them and we can get more information on the issue.

First, I'll explain this whole validation thing: When a user is logged into the site, any form that is presented to them has a hidden value called "form_token", which is unique to the user. This value is included in the form to prevent a malicious website from hijacking a user's Anthrocon account through the user of a Cross-site Scripting Attack.

The value is created by Drupal based on the user's session ID, which is a random value that is unique for each user. There seem to be some situations in which a user's session ID will expire, but due to weird caching (or whatever), the user is presented with a "stale" version of a form, and therefore with a "stale" form_token, which is no longer valid. Submitting a form with a stale (or missing) form token WILL result in the dreaded "Validation Error". I'm still not 100% certain that this is the cause of the issue, but it is the leading theory for now. I welcome other theories.

Since I am still not certain of the exact issue, I had to come up with a workaround that is somewhat uh, comprehensive. In this order:

1) Remove all cookies for Anthrocon.org. This will effectively log you out as well.

2) Log back in to Anthrocon.org.

3) Reload the problem page.

4) Do a "power refresh" on that page, by holding down the shift key and clicking the "reload" button.

If that fixes the problem, please let me know in a comment. If it doesn't fix the problem, please let me kwow about that, along with what browser you're using, so I can investigate further.

Thanks!

 
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