Changing Passwords

As most of you know, when we transferred users from Market Leader to our Clickability based site, existing passwords got lost in process and random passwords were generated.  Right now, if I user forgets their password, they can use a “forgot” my password function that will send them their existing random password, bu there is no way for them to change it to something they will remember.  This is an issue that we are pursuing with Clickability.

Until then, here’s what we can do to help someone who contacts us with a problem similar to Mr. Cantor’s attached below.

In cmPublish:

1. Distribute Tab>Subscribers>View subscribers.

2. Search for the user, using their email address or their name.   If you can’t find them that way, you’ll need to email them to determine what email address they used for their cmPublish login (as it might not be the same  one  they used to email you.   In Mr. Cantor’s case, I couldn’t find him by name, but the email address clicked.

3. When you find the record in the list of subscriber records returned, click on the email address to open it.  (See attachment to see what this page looks like)

4. Click the check box to expire the user’s password the next time they log in.  This check box gets turned off automatically when the user logs in again and changes their password.

5. Change their password to something user friendly like “temporary” using the Change Password link.

6. SAVE

7. Send the user a friendly email  apologizing for the inconvenience and telling them that their password has been changed to “temporary” or whatever and that the next time they login, they should used that password to get in, and then they will be prompted to change their password to whatever they like.  Ask  the user to then log out and log back in to verify that the new password works, and send you back a brief email confirming that they were able to change their password.

Let me know if you have any questions on this procedure.  You can try this on your own account to see how it works before you actually need  to do it for a user.. Note that this will only change your login to www.philly.com, not cmPublish, even if you are using your phillynews.com email address as the user id in both cases.)

Note:  If the user is logged in on another computer and then logs on with the new temporary password on a second computer, it appears that they do not get the prompt to enter a new password.  If  a user follows the instruction you give him but doesn't get prompted to enter a new password immediately after logging in, ask them if it's possible that they are already logged in on another computer.