Terrible login experience

[roland_bouman]

SDN would remember me - I would visit sdn.sap.com, and it would already log me in automatically. Since the move away from SDN this has changend.

Usually, I have to login (I use login via facebook). Sometimes, not - or well, the experience is clunky. Let me explain.

Earlier today, I visited go.sap.com/community.html to create a question. I clicked the "anonymous" avatar, clicked the facebook login icon, got logged in, and posted my question.

Later today, I visited go.sap.com/community.html again. The site clearly remembered me, and was showing the notifications icon inside my avatar. See screenshot:

So, naturally, I clicked the notifications link.

Next, I get directed to activities.sap.com/#notifications, and sadness ensues:

Look at all these people. They are having a laugh because I have to login. Again.

Why? Clearly, the landing page telling me I have notifications knows who I am. Shouldn't it be clear to the page that actually contains the notifications who I am as well?

Please fix, it's annoying. Please just always remember me (save when I clear my cookies)

[former_member181891]

Hi Roland,

I ran into the same issue yesterday with accessing the Notifications stream, but it ultimately resolved itself right as I was about to report it. Did it resolve for you? We're looking into more info as to the cause.

Thanks!

Jamie

[roland_bouman]

@Jamie, thanks for the reply.

Today, I entered the home page, and I had to login. And after being logged in, my avatar showed, with the notification icon. I could then access my notifications directly without having to login again.

So, I guess, what I experienced today was closer to what I would expect, minus the initial login (scn always remembered, until after clearing cookies).

Whether the issue is now "resolved" I dare not say. I will have to experience the same consistent behavior a couple of times before I would think it is "fixed".

[former_member181891]

Thanks for the follow up, Roland. The team continues to work on smoothing out the SSO processes & I'll share any info on root cause/resolution when I have it.

Best,

Jamie

[iklovski]

I had similar issue today. But, at least, I have my Notifications back 🙂

[LutzR · Accepted solution]

They are laughing at me too.

The technical reason is a quite superfluous protocol switch from HTTPS to HTTP when clicking links. For some strange reason SAP tries to stay with unencrypted traffic but stumbles and falls to generate URLs appropriately. (Many comapanies are available via HTTPS only today)

It looks quite erratic when they use HTTP and when they use HTTPS for links. HTTP will be anonymous - HTTPS will be with user session. Clicking the anonymous avatar or logging in will switch back to https (and recover the login) again.

Solving this looks like an easy task: Just do HTTPS only (or generate URLs correctly or use protocol agnostic links like //answers.sap.com according to RFC3986 Section 4.2).

PS: I am now aware that this should probably have been a comment and no answer, shouldn't it? Sorry. I still don't get it.

[roland_bouman · Accepted solution]

Hi Lutz!

Thanks for your reply. I think your analysis makes a lot of sense - thanks for taking the time - I appreciate it 🙂

It is beyond me how SAP Community team is going to manage bugs filed through this platform.

I just marked your answer as "best" and this probably means my question is answered. But does this mean the actual issue will get fixed? And how will we as users be able to track progress, like one can in many available flavours of bug tracking platforms?

(Questions above are not entirely rhetorical,but I realise they should be answered by the SAP Community team)

[jerryjanda · Accepted solution]

Hi, Roland:

The SAP Community team is trying to answer posts with Using SAP.com, Coffee Corner, and Idea Place. Unfortunately, we're a bit behind (as you noticed).

I'm reaching out to our SSO expert to see if I can get a more official response to your comment.

RE: your other concerns: We do post known bugs and also highlight new features and fixes. Was there anything specific you were looking for? I'd be happy to supply links, etc.

Best regards,

--Jerry

[Jelena_Perfiljeva · Accepted solution]

Login on SCN is terribly inconsistent. I use certificate and S-user but at any given point, I do not know whether I'm logged in or not. E.g. when I first open the SCN home page it does not show me as logged in. But when I navigate to another page, I am logged in. Later in the day, the reverse happens: I can see my profile picture at first but when I navigate somewhere - it's gone.

Ironically, I navigated to this question from my personal activity stream (which I could not see if I wasn't logged in) but when I right-clicked to open it in another tab, somehow I could not post a comment because I was not logged in.

This is nothing new. If you go to "Using SAP.com tag" and search for "login" in Q&A you'll find several posts mentioning login problems. I've also posted a question back in November about the odd behavior of login. Audrey Stevenson replied there, so I thought someone has already been informed. But now it seems that this is somehow news.

@Jerry - the feedback tracking format we had for Open Beta (blog with a table, I think) was not perfect but better than nothing. In the SDN->SCN migration we also had a publicly available list of open issues. I don't see anything similar for the bug reports on SCN. Replying individually (while appreciated) must be time-consuming and also ineffective in letting the wide community know what is being tracked already. I believe your team needs to publish the known bug list and link it on the home page.

[jcgood25 · Accepted solution]

Alerted by Twitter from the recent #sitWDF, I assume this slide photo reveals some numbers?

[roland_bouman · Accepted solution]

@Jerry, thanks for the reply.

I just think it's weird problems with the community site itself appear as questions on the same forum as where community can post actual questions about using actual SAP products.It just leads to a weird experience.

For example, the community homepage lists a top questions section. Sometimes, half of that consists of issues with the site. Or in searching questions, "questions" (actually: bug reports) about the SAP community site will occasionally be among the search results.

That's not what I visit the site for. I think you'll find precious few people are interested in finding questions about issues with the SAP community site among the "real" questions about SAP products.
And w/re to the issues with SAP community site that I do post as a "question", the best confirmation I can get that it is noticed by SAP is a comment by a SAP employee. But after that, there is no place where I can go to keep track of the status of the issue. Even the most modest of bug trackers lets you track status.

I guess I'm just saying I don't think bug reports, esp. about the community site, should be mixed with regular, "real" community questions.

[Steffi_Warnecke · Accepted solution]

Hey Roland,

just a small side note: On the old SCN bugs and feedback were also posted in the community under two spaces ("About SCN" and "SCN Support"), so it's not really a new thing to have these questions/discussions/bug reports in the community. 🙂

.

Regards,

Steffi.

[jerryjanda · Accepted solution]

Hi, Jelena:

There is a "known bugs" list available at http://www.sap.com/community/about/support/known-issues.html, broken down by topic. Is this what you mean?

If it is, it is accessible from the home page. The link is "Known Issues and Community FAQs"

If I'm not understanding your suggestion, please let me know.

As for responding individually...you're right -- it is very time-consuming. Which means that sometimes we may be behind or not able to answer at the moment, and this is sometimes perceived as us not listening. But we are doing our best to respond to Using SAP.com questions, Coffee Corner discussions (where appropriate), and Idea Place. As admitted elsewhere, however, we need to do a better job of circling back to alert people when specific fixes and features address their initial comments.

For now, I'll remind the team to make sure all known bugs are on this list. Also, we are prioritizing both bug fixes and feature development based on the community feedback, but we need to do a better job of explaining the progress (beyond just announcing what's new without additional context).

Best regards,

--Jerry

[jerryjanda · Accepted solution]

Hi, Roland:

Per Steffi's point, this isn't entirely new -- although I see your point as well. This is a bit tricky. I think we should give people the ability to search for community issues, because we're encouraging them to engage with us -- and we want everyone to know whether certain problems/suggestions have been raised. Suppressing them in search (if that's what you're suggesting) would make interaction difficult.

But maybe that's not what you're suggesting. If you're advising us not to highlight these questions on the home page, etc., it's something for us to consider -- but if they're popular, we do need to take that into consideration.

RE: bug tracker. Jelena raised a similar point below. We do have a method for reporting known issues. But we can always improve upon it. I've gone back to my colleagues for discussion.

Best regards,

--Jerry

[Jelena_Perfiljeva · Accepted solution]

Well, duh, it's combined with FAQ and is in "Getting Started" section, how could I possibly miss it? </sarcasm=off>

I could not find there several items that I remember from the top of my head. There is nothing about not being able to enter an answer or a comment (because Submit button does not do anything), nothing about login issues (as I mentioned, several posts already exist in Using SAP.com), nothing about the private moderator comments visible in the activity stream or deleted items visible, this one is not there, this whole collection. Pretty sure there are many more items that are unaccounted for. How frequently is the list updated? And how do we know when it's updated? There is no follow button, it seems (or I could not see it because of some bug).

Also previous lists had links to the corresponding discussions. This would be nice to have, especially when the description is brief. E.g. "user gets an error" - but which error?

Thank you.

[jerryjanda · Accepted solution]

Hi, Jelena:

I checked back with my team with a request to check to make sure all recent bugs are represented.

Linking them back to discussions is a good idea. I want to start tying more of communications back to the appropriate discussions.

I'm afraid there is no way to follow this page. It's a static page, not a blog post, so people would need to bookmark and check, although we could certainly use the home page to announce updates to the page.

Best regards,

--Jerry

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

I don't think that a second page (homepage) would need to be updated to tell that the known bug list is updated.

In my opinion it is more important that one source IS updated at all.

The wiki with community updates was last changed in December 21.

As we can read in other discussions has the bug with the activity stream on a mobile device been fixed today, so I would expect to see an update in the wiki.