Can't login? Can't stay logged in? Can't post? Can't see pictures or the registration code?
It sounds like Cookies are blocked or broken on your end. Read on to understand and fix.

Cookies are unique keys that let your Browser validate its identity. Without working Cookies, our site has no idea who you are from click to click and consequently limits your access. Broken Cookies = unknown identity = limited access.

1. When your Browser loaded this page, it did not send us a Cookie.

2. Therefore, we just sent a fresh Cookie to your Browser.

3. Now, make your Browser reload this page.

4. You should not see this message again.

5. If this exact same message appears again after reload (and again, and again), it means that something on your end is blocking or breaking Cookies, and you must fix it to allow Cookies before our site will work properly. We require working Cookies.

This might help you:

1. "Software Firewalls" from Norton, McAfee and others are bad jokes that haphazardly break rules (and Cookies) while frantically attempting to cover Microsoft's ongoing security flaws. Uninstall or turn these toys off, if only for access to our site. Low-cost hardware firewalls from D-Link or Linksys provide much better protection without blocking or breaking Cookies or other crucial Internet standards.

2. "High security settings" in Microsoft's shabby Internet Explorer break Cookies and other Internet Standards with undue, non-standard restrictions which are really just emergency patches foisted by Microsoft to fix its endless stream of severe security flaws. Turn down the Options/Privacy slider to Moderate or Low. Our site poses no threat to your security.

3. Check other Browser settings: Sometimes Cookies are blocked by accident or by choice, often due to now outdated privacy concerns. Allow Cookies. They are fast and secure in modern browsers. Also, triple-check the obvious. One Member had his "display pictures" browser option turned off and suffered for months without any pictures!

4. Try prepending "www." to the website name. Example: use http://www.eastghost.com/ instead of just http://eastghost.com/. This might help you right away. Try browsing this same page to see if cookies suddenly work with the "www." prepended to the domain name. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, but this exact solution worked for at least three people (that we know of, so far) who were using "firewall software."

5. You might consider upgrading to better and faster browsers such as Firefox or Opera. Both are far superior and totally side-step all the Microsoft/Norton/McAfee problems while giving other benefits such as faster speed, stability and much greater resistance to the persistent security holes, attacks, virii, and other nonsense that plague stupid software. After being burned by it so many times over so many years, we've been trained to violently abhor Microsoft, Norton and McAfee software. You can benefit from our very painful mistakes.

Whatever solution you discover, please let us know. We'll adjust this information to help the next person.

Your IP Address: 38.107.191.109 • Server Time Now: 2010-03-10 05:13:06

As soon as you opened this web page you're now reading, before anything displayed on your screen, your Browser sent exactly this data to our Server:

x-cc-id ccc04-02
Host groundhero.org
User-Agent CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)
Accept text/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection close
Cache-Control no-cache
Pragma no-cache
Cookie cookie=56859215a7b7ce3d43108f03cede9187

Your Browser did not send the "mdgTestCookie" to our Server.

Then, also before anything printed on your screen, our Server just sent exactly this data to your Browser:

Set-Cookie mdgTestCookie=c6e74eafa0ce47658339f89ce5e4b2fa
expires=Fri, 09-Apr-2010 10:13:06 GMT
domain=groundhero.org
path=/
0
Cache-Control no-cache, must-revalidate
Expires Mon, 1 Jan 1997 00:00:00 GMT

Somewhere in your Browser's menus may be an option to show you the actual Cookies and contents that should consequently be stored on your computer. Firefox and Opera can do this; many versions of Internet Explorer can not. Fortunately, you can also just Reload this page.

When you reload this page, your Browser should send back to our Server that exact same Cookie that our Server just sent to your Browser (the "mdgTestCookie"). This "Cookie Mechanism" --the passing back-and-forth of the unique Cookie-- is how our Server uniquely identifies your Browser, keeps you "logged in" and allows you to see pictures and post messages.

If anything on your end blocks your Browser from properly seeing our "mdgTestCookie" Cookie (or any Cookie), or from correctly saving it, or from immediately returning it to our Server, then you will not be able to see pictures, post or stay logged in. It's just that simple. Without that Cookie for identification, our server has no idea who you are, and consequently your access is fully limited.