We must maintain very tight security on our website because there are literally thousands of hackers we must filter out of our firewall who try to conduct hacking or denial service attacks on a constant basis. As a result, our website security settings are very tight and this can sometimes lead to inconvenience for our users. We discuss this on the “About->Website security*” page in our menus at the link below:
https://sedm.org/about/website-security/
Our site is setup to lock you out for any of the following reasons:
- You entered a non-existent username. This locks you out IMMEDIATELY.
- You entered the correct username but the wrong password three times or more in a row.
- You gave out your password to someone else and both you and the other person are trying to access the site at the same time with the same account. This is a HUGE no no, especially with Member Subscriptions.
Because of #1 above, you should be VERY careful in entering your username because if you are careless, such as using a touchscreen, you will be locked out for 24 hours! Some users have also been known to entirely forget their username or use a username from another site because they confused us with another site.
The most frequent cause of people being locked out is trying to login on a a cellphone where the reception is poor and not all characters are transmitted during login. Its best to ensure that you login from a computer through a landline to prevent this problem.
Lockouts are set to last 24 hours and then automatically expire, thus allowing you to login again without contacting us to unlock you. Resetting your password or having the system resend your password won’t remove the lockout.
Be advised that if you request that the system send you your password because you forgot it, you may not receive the email if one of the following conditions exist:
- There is no account registered under your email address.
- You made a typo in the email address to send the password reset to.
- The registered email address is inaccessable because you no longer use that email provider. In this case, simply create a new account.
- You are using yahoo email. They commonly reject our email traffic. We mention this in our Support Page, section 10.2
- The email was sent through an email server or ISP IP address that is on our firewall blocking list because it has been conducting denial of service attacks on our website. See the About->Website Security* menu item for details. That page contains a Hackers Report that you can use to determine if the IP address is blocked by the firewall.
If you are unable to get the password reset because of any of the above problems, you can submit a request to our Contact Us page to request a manual password reset. Please use this option sparingly and be careful to write down your password to minimize the workload servicing this type of needless problem.
If you are locked out, then the easiest way to unlock yourself is to simply wait 24 hours and it will happen automatically. Some users who are in a bind and need immediate access restored and can’t wait 24 hours use our About->Contact menu to send us a contact message to ask to be manually unlocked. We can do this, but it can get really time consuming supporting this. Please therefore only entertain this option as a last resort.
Lockouts are based upon your IP address. The best way to work around a 24-hour temporary lockout WITHOUT asking us to manually unlock and WITHOUT waiting 24 hours is to use a DIFFERENT device that uses a DIFFERENT IP address until the 24 hour timer is up. That means, if your phone was locked out, use your computer, or vice versa. Note, however, that if your phone was using your local WIFI and shares the WIFI or you home network with your computer, this won’t solve a temporary lockout problem. You would have to turn off your phone WIFI after the lockout and login through the cell network instead in order for your IP address to change so that the lockout won’t affect your phone. We cover this at the link in the footer of the opening page (http://sedm.org) indicated also below:
CLICK HERE if you are having trouble accessing the site on some but not all of your internet devices
Please also be advised that our firewall can sometimes inadvertently filter out emails you send to us directly. Therefore, if you try to contact us by sending an email, it isn’t guaranteed to reach us and sometimes will not reach us.
The ONLY way to be SURE you can reach us is to use the About->Contact menu item and send a message through that interface. That method of contact is GUARANTEED to work.
Lastly, we highly recommend that you use a password manager to prevent most of the problems on this page and save us a TON of time answering needless trouble calls by people who forgot their username and/or password or confused us with another site. We recommend Keepass, in case you are curious.