Dear Subscribers,
Our IT staff has been busy behind the scenes in the past few weeks making some changes that we feel will firewall our site against some of the issues we experienced in December and January. As subscribers to our product, I wanted to make you all aware of these changes, as it will require at least one small step from each of you.
First, I want to give you all some background on our website. When WholeHogSports was launched 12 years ago and redesigned in 2012, there never was any thought given to adding a message board to the site. So when the HI merger happened nearly two years ago, our IT staff was given the task of merging subscriptions from two content management systems (CMS) - one for news content on the website and one for the message boards.
We wanted to make the user experience as friendly as possible, so we created a login that made our two CMS talk to each other. That has been easier said than done, however. Having these two CMS talk to each other is seen as suspicious by several of the browsers we all use, such as Safari, Firefox and Chrome. It has caused some of you to receive a message in the realm of “the site redirected too many times.” This has also caused some of you to be asked to login at a high frequency; some every day.
Beginning this week, we are decoupling the logins for our content side and message board. We feel confident this move will improve the user experience.
When your login cookies expire again, you might be asked to login twice - once when you attempt to read a story and once when you visit the message board. The email address and password combination will not change and can be used to access both sides of the website. (For those who are newspaper subscribers, this is similar to you logging in once to read ArkansasOnline/NWADG and once to read the e-edition of the newspaper.)
Each login cookie - this is what remembers you have logged in - will be saved for 30 days, then you will be asked to sign in again. If you consistently read our story content on this site, your cookie should automatically rollover into the following month. (Please note that if you have your browser cookies set to delete each time your quit your browser, you will always be asked to login. This can be changed in your browser settings.)
Ideally, you should not have to login to either side of the site more than one time every 30 days. Please remember that each login cookie only works for one browser (i.e. logging in on Safari on your home computer will not login to Safari on your iPhone or iPad). For those who access stories through social media apps, those mediums have separate browsers that might require additional logins. For instance, I am logged into this site in several browsers - three on my laptop, my iPhone Twitter app, my iPhone Safari browser and my iPad Safari browser. It is always a good idea to save your login information so that you do not have to manually re-enter it each time a cookie expires.
As always, please feel free to message me on this site or email me at mojones@nwadg.com with questions about our website. We appreciate your subscription and are constantly looking for ways to improve.
Thanks,
Matt