Spinning Wheel on Registration and Sign In

cortes@lemm.ee to Beehaw Support@beehaw.org – 5 points –

I tried to submit a registration request four days ago. After clicking the submit button, I got a spinning wheel. This went on for several minutes. Thinking it might have been the Safari browser, I tried it again in Chrome and got the same thing. After a couple of days, I tried to log in and also got the spinning wheel. I left that page open for a couple of hours with no response. Is this and issue with running on MacOS? Could the request have gone through and response didn't get back to me? I can try again on iOS or iPadOS.

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Yeah, it’s unfortunate a lot of new users are experiencing this. There are several issues with account registration/login, all resulting in the spinning icon of doom.

  1. ⁠Mobile browsers sometimes append a space after your username into the field
  2. ⁠Having any - (dashes) in your password
  3. ⁠Your password being too long
  4. ⁠The username already is in use
  5. ⁠Server load at the time is too high

What you can try is:

  1. ⁠After you register, even if you get the spinning icon of doom, try to log in. Sometimes it just works!
  2. ⁠If that didn’t work, try the reset password flow. Put your email address into the username field and click the forgot password link

I’ve found the reset password flow to fix my user when I have login issues.

I got the registration to work, but when I tried to log in, I get the spinning wheel again. Would this happen if my application wasn't processed? It's only been a short time so I'll give it a few hours and try again.

I can add one to this list. If you have a strong firewall setup that blocks DNS redirection, you may need to turn it off just for the account creation submission. I tried to create an account here several times, and got spun every time. I ended up making an account on .world and therefore know that a successful submission will very briefly show a green "Submitted" flag and redirect to the main landing page. At then end of the submission here, in the background there is a DNS/CDN packet that gets sent and is not present in the .world instance. If this packet is blocked, you will not be able to submit the application for a new account. (As of 2 days ago, the backlog to process my new account took around 3 days - not a complaint - just an observation for anyone in the process and reading this message)

Another thing to keep in mind and why the spinning wheel could be happening while attempting to log in is thus: A user's registration application hasn't been reviewed yet. We have a huge backlog that we are working through.

I don't think your browser matters so much. I got an infinite spinning wheel my first try. I reloaded the page, and second time it went through immediately. Maybe just try a few times in succession and don't bother waiting if it doesn't go through right away.

I tried it again and it went through right away. I saw a post in support about the 'spinning wheel of death' so it's not uncommon.

I got the registration to work and received an approval email. Now the login page gives me the same spinning wheel. I've tried on my iPad and another MacOS computer with the same result. Could this be a load issue?

Update

I fixed by using my email to log in instead of my user id.

This is an issue with the UI - I've been meaning to work on isolating it - so far my hunch is that it's to do with the graphics resources - I have not tested this exhaustively but you can see errors in the browser console when this happens.

I found by putting my browser into desktop mode it would not be stuck "loading", but actually submitted the form. Took mutiple attempts.

Close out of the window, wait a few minutes, then try the whole thing again. The Lemmy system is pretty overloaded with the Reddit flood right now and I have to do this dealing with the eternal spinner a few times a day. No worries.

The Beehaw registration system is itself overloaded and has crumbled under the onslaught. Don’t wait for an email. Try logging in occasionally. It might take a few days.

Meanwhile, your lemm.ee account gets you full access to all of Beehaw, just like if you were a member of Beehaw. One of the joys of the Fediverse!

I'd love to believe this is overwhelming demand, but it's not - it happens on small instances with plenty of capacity. there's some kind of issue here that is really hampering the sign up process and we need to figure it out and fix it.

Correct. It’s a Lemmy-wide issue. Whether the instance is large or small, if it’s on Lemmy it’s getting the spins.

This was not happening before the wave of Reddit users. I never had to deal with it before the Reddit blackout.

that's interesting - I came with the wave and it has been happening since I first set up the instance. I am also seeing it on a local dev system that isn't even accesssible from the internet - not a UI developer, but will have a crack at trying to figure out what's going on here. It's a very frustrating issue.

There are a lot of issues. Like, I’m seeing four identical copies of your reply. I’m pretty sure there aren’t actually four copies in the thread, and they are only on my message screen. Lots of little things like that. I figure they are just growing pains, and I’ll wait them out.

yes, most of the quirks can be overlooked but the registration process is pretty critical to encouraging signups and participation. We're never going to become bigger than reddit at this rate /s

500,000,000 users vs. 150,000 users? We can do it! <waves pom-poms in air, does cheerleader kicks>

that's the spirit! To be fair, the fediverse is a great deal bigger than lemmy. Lemmy is just the closest thing to reddit on it, so a considerable number of folks who don't like the way reddit inevitably goes will land on lemmy (if it works properly). Lemmy has similar properties (and probably people) as reddit did early on.

I spent some time trying to replicate this spinning thing with matching passwords but was unable to do so. However, what I see is that the UI does not provide feedback when the passwords don't match - instead, the submit button icon spins. This suggests a defect in the UI, for which alas, I have neither time or skills to address - BTW I'm not affiliated with any support group, Beehaw or otherwise.

I'm not able to pursue this with Lemmy's developers myself, but it would be worth making sure that it is understood (I can't imagine it hasn't already been reported, it's an obvious issue - the UI should tell you when the passwords don't match, not spin). There's an issue log at github but I'm not sure what beehaw is doing as far as this forum goes or who would be interested in pursuing this, assuming that I'm correct.

You can see this issue for yourself by going to any lemmy instance and attempting to join with mismatching passwords - I just did so at lemmy.ml

The weird thing is that it tells you when the password is too short, but it doesn't when they don't match. I am using browser ad and popup blocker but that shouldn't be an issue.

I don't believe that this is the extent of the issue because what I've seen suggests that it has occurred sometimes when the passwords are matching, but I daresay all the submit button spinning stuff is related to password validation somehow - because I haven't heard of it happening once the user is authenticated.

Idk if this is helpful to you, but matching passwords still gives me the infinite wheel.

Looking at the recent changes over the past few days to the current codebase (not yet released) I expect this issue should be resolved in the next Lemmy release and you should stop seeing it once your instance admin upgrades the current version - I don't know the new release timeframe but the previous release was last week, so hopefully quite soon.

Excellent, thanks so much for the legwork while I caffeinate and chat with my friend. I owe you one!

for what it's worth, I updated the local dev system with the latest code and I see this is resolved - a message appears when the passwords don't match and the button no longer spins. git logs show quite a lot of fixes to the UI since the release last week, so the UI should be significantly better on next release.

Having the registration process hang will discourage the non-technical user. Maybe some mention of the issue on the registration page might be useful. If there had been an explanation and said to do what was brought up in this thread, I certainly would have followed the instructions and felt better about the issue.

I agree wholeheartedly. Since this is "Beehaw Support" maybe the admins here will take your suggestion - I am not with Beehaw, just happened to see this post. I can see fairly certainly that the registration hangs and the submit button spins when the masked password fields don't match. Given the number of complaints I've seen - and also what I've experienced myself, this very likely also occurs sometimes when they do match. The user interface should say "passwords don't match" instead of spinning like that. It provides feedback when the password is too short, but not when they don't match. Also once it hangs, it doesn't matter what you do with the password fields, or even refreshing sometimes - the same behavior continues, matching passwords or not.

Hopefully the coders working on Lemmy can take care of this relatively soon because it's not the greatest first impression for users.