Obtain a password to access the members section
La section members of the centcols.org website is reserved for active club members. To access it, you need to enter your membership number and password. For reasons of confidentiality, no administrator has access to members' passwords.
If you have forgotten your password, you can request a temporary password and then, once you have logged in, change it to the one of your choice.
Please note: if you have forgotten your password, use this procedure to request a temporary password before your 10th failure, otherwise your account will be blocked. UOnce your account has been blocked, you will no longer be able to access the members for 24 hours, or you will need to contact [email]assistance@centcols.org[/email].
There are 4 steps to follow:
Go to the section membersIf you remember your member number, enter it and go directly to step 2. Otherwise, click on Forgotten your membership number? then enter your first and last name or your e-mail address and click "send". Your membership number should then be displayed. Click on it to continue.
Click on Forgot your password? On the page that appears, your e-mail address appears and you must confirm it by clicking on "send". This will send you a temporary password by e-mail to the address in question. For security reasons, this password is only valid for for 4 hours In addition, you will not be able to restart the procedure before a period of 4 hours. (For the reasons for these safety features, see lower.)
Check your e-mail within a few minutes and you should find the message with the temporary password. If not, also check the recycle bin for junk mail (spam). If you have not received the temporary password within one hour of your request (step 2), please contact [email]assistance@centcols.org[/email].
Return to the section membersEnter your member number again and now also your temporary password. Click on "Send" and a message will appear asking you to go to your member file and enter a permanent password. Click on the link to do so.
Once on your member card, enter the password of your choice and enter it a second time. Save the form.
Be aware that some browsers try to make your life easier by remembering passwords that have already been used. So after changing a password, always make sure you don't leave a pre-filled password entry field, but type in the whole password.
Another precaution: if you copy and paste your password, be careful not to copy a space or punctuation mark at the same time as the password itself.
Password security features
Some of you may wonder why we use what you might call draconian password security measures. The answer is simple: the Internet is an environment where nothing is safe unless it is explicitly verified. So here are the reasons why these measures are in place:
Temporary password lifetime limited to 4 hours. This limits exposure to the risk of an incorrect or out-of-date e-mail address. If we have an incorrect address for you, your password could possibly reach a third party (former office colleague, for example).
4-hour moratorium on temporary password requests. Here we want to limit attacks aimed at consuming all system resources and creating a deluge of emails. For example, a crook could easily write a program that would send a temporary password to a member more than 100 times in 1 minute. The moratorium limits this potential.
Account blocked after 10 successive incorrect passwords. This is designed to eliminate automated password searches. If a fraudulent user tries to find your password by trying thousands of possibilities, they will be blocked after just 10 attempts, which drastically limits the risk of the password being found by this so-called "brute force" method. But if you make 1o mistakes yourself, your account will also be blocked for 24 hours. In an emergency, you can always ask for your account to be unblocked by writing to [email]assistance@centcols.org[/email] and explaining why.
Mandatory change of temporary passwords. Temporary passwords are sent to you by e-mail, so the message passes through one or more servers that relay it to your e-mail inbox, where it is stored for some time. These are all opportunities for them to be read by unauthorised third parties. The level of security of the temporary password is therefore not sufficient for it to become your permanent password.