The day before yesterday, a thing happened: I was in the middle of crafting a lengthy new topic about my ideal Templar hero talents, and I strongly suspect that, while I was still composing that new topic, my prepaid game time expired. (It’s also possible that the prepaid game time expired before I began composing that new topic, but the web page hadn’t yet realized that it expired, and didn’t check until I clicked the “+ Create Topic” button at the bottom to submit my post.)
Yesterday, I bought a Battle.net card, charged up my account, and bought another 60 days of game time. I was able to log in to WoW and play; I even cheesed the “get 3000 reputation with Dragonflight factions” quest requirement by hanging onto some reputation tokens from last week and consuming them this week. But that, unfortunately, didn’t permit me to post in the forums again—it still said that I didn’t have an active account. Even when I checked my account status and saw it was indeed active, the forum still said “You need an active World of Warcraft subscription to post on this forum.”
I thought, “Fine—sometimes, systems like these take time to realize you’ve paid; I’ll give it some time.” So I checked again this morning, and…it’s still got the same message.
As a software developer myself, I suspect I’ve run across some kind of bug that happens when the user gets to a place they’re theoretically not supposed to be on the forums’ UI, and then they try to post a new topic while their account is inactive. I know I might be incorrect about this suspicion, but I figure I should ask about this either way.
EDIT: I have been using Firefox to interact with the forums, but I also have Chrome installed on my laptop. I randomly decided to try using logging into the forums using Chrome, and to my surprise, I was able to post in the paladin forums in Chrome.
So this is definitely some kind of bug…I should add that pressing Control+F5 did not fix the problem in Firefox; indeed, Firefox still has the issue for me.
EDIT: and the evening after I made my last edit, the problem went away—when I look at the Paladin forums in Firefox, I see a “New Topic” button.
I don’t understand it, but hopefully this won’t be much of a problem for anyone else, and if anyone else has the same issue I did, they’ll know that either switching browsers or a few days of waiting will fix it…