CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Marilyn. When you say "clicks on Register", where is the click taking place? From the home page? From the toolbar, or some link further down on the page? The more details, the better.

Is the user in question running any browser settings or extensions that prevent sites like the Commons from setting cookies? We block certain kinds of automated traffic to /register/ as a spam-prevention measure - that's the error message that user is seeing - but normal use should not produce false positives, unless the browser isn't accepting cookies from the Commons.

She is trying from here - http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/register. I'll ask her your questions about the cookies now.

Cool. Any more details you can give about exactly what she's doing would be helpful. How is she getting to http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/register? Visiting it directly by pasting the URL into her browser, or clicking a link to get there? If the latter, where is that link? Is she seeing the Forbidden message after submitting the registration form, or when visiting /register/ for the first time?

I've passed along these qs as well. I did send her the http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/register link, and I do think she tried from there.

Her first email indicated that she was looking here - http://ols57.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2016/09/02/what-to-do-when-an-ols-managed-service-is-not-available/ - then tried to subscribe. She then attempted to join, but not sure how.

Should I ask her to try from home? Emphasizing, of course, that it's her choice but might help pinpoint the problem. I'd never do this with a regular student or faculty member, but she's an Electronic Resources Librarian so my guess is she wouldn't take offense.

The first thing I'd ask her to do is to visit https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/, and then click on the Register link at the upper-right. This ensures that the browser has a sufficient chance to set the cookie. If that doesn't work, then yes, please have her try from another computer (or even another browser). That won't solve whatever bug exists here, but it will at least allow her to register.

She just wrote to say "Our tech person pointed out what I was doing wrong. I am all set up now. "