Pale Moon & Linux Mint Forums: Corrupted Cookie(s)

[Night Wing]

Even though I no longer run the linux Mint distro, I did run/use it from the years 2013 to 2025. But I am still a registered member on the linux Mint Forums site at the link below.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/

I stay in touch with this site since at the computer repair shop where I help out as a volunteer, I install the linux Mint distro on many customers computers who are fed up using Windows 11 and who want a linux distro. In my opinion, Mint is the easiest linux distro to learn for a not too tech savvy customer coming from Windows to Linux for the first time.

About seven days ago, I could not reach the Mint Forums site using, at the time of this posting, 64 bit (GTK3) linux Pale Moon 34.3.1 running in 64 bit MX Linux 25.2 (Infinity) Xfce.

I kept getting a flickering Mint logo in the Navigation (Address) Bar. After a long pause, I would finally get a prompt saying: "too many requests" on a white screen on my external monitor.

I initially thought the site got hacked and this was the reason I could not bring up the Mint Forums website. I then tried my other two linux browsers, Waterfox and Firefox, to see if I could reach the Forums site. And with both Waterfox and Firefox, I could reach the site in less than a second of time.

I then surmised maybe the Mint Forums site had changed something and it wanted a Chrome type browser since I could no longer use my linux Pale Moon to access it. But I wanted to try something else "first" to see if the site really wanted a Chrome type browser.

I have had this happen before on other sites occasionally over my almost 15 years when using Pale Moon. The culprit seemed to be a corrupted cookie so I went this way first.

Using the Menu Bar, I went to Tools > Permissions to access the Permissions Manager. In the Permissions Manager, I loaded the link above and it showed 6 cookies which were "Allowed".

I deleted all 6 cookies, since I did not know which cookie might be causing the problem for the site, by clicking on "Remove Cookies". I then went back to the link above and this time Pale Moon accessed the site without any problems.

Of course I had to log back in to gain to get back to where I was before things went south on me. For the last two days I have not had any problems accessing the Mint Forums site.

So if someone starts having a problem with a site they go to on an everyday basis and suddenly Pale Moon will not work, the problem might be a corrupted cookie or cookies. This is just a "heads up" as in FYI (for your information).

[andyprough]

Maybe Mint updated the cookies they were using? Do sites ever do this? They must at some point I would imagine. I'm not familiar with cookie policies and procedures.