Tom's Hardware Registered Users: Account Upgrades Coming, Please Confirm Email Addresses (Updated)

Urgent: We're currently experiencing issues with users not being logged in when they should, or their sessions expiring too soon. This is an unfortunate side effect of our work to roll out a new Single Sign-On feature with improved security that is currently underway.

A workaround for the issue is to simply refresh the page. You'll automatically be reconnected, and won't have to go through the sign-in process again.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled news feed to handle a bit of Tom's Hardware housekeeping. Specifically, because of some upgrades to our account registration and security, we're asking our registered users (Hi guys) to confirm the email address associated with their account. It's simple, quick and necessary for you to retain all the achievements and badges you've racked up over the years, so please do so as soon as possible -- before the upgrade happens later this week.

(And, hey, if you've never registered an account with us before, now would be a fine time to do so.)

Detailed instructions from our stalwart Senior Community Manager, Joe Pishgar, are below:

Hey there Tom's Readers and Community Members,To keep our site safe and secure for our users, we're rolling out some improvements to account registration and security in the coming days and weeks ahead. As these changes are likely to impact a significant number of our users, we're asking everyone right now to please confirm your email address associated with your account if you have not done so already. If you've confirmed your email already with us, you'll have a green check mark under your profile here that will look like this:You can change your email address by going to http://www.tomshardware.com/community/account while logged in and checking under "Email."One of the first things we're going to be doing is purging any non-confirmed email accounts from our database, so unfortunately, if you aren't confirmed when we do so, you may end up losing all your account and any progress towards badges, your threads, posts and comments. Unfortunately, there is no means by which we can work around this limitation. Accounts with non-confirmed email addresses will no longer be directly accessible after this security upgrade.Confirming your email with us is pretty simple, and we strongly encourage you to do so today.A second group of users will also be impacted by the change, specifically those users who have registered with a social network sign-in. Users whose accounts were created using LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo, or Microsoft Messenger will need to confirm their email addresses and provide a password for their account here on Tom's. Messaging and notification alerts will be sent to these users to inform them of the impending change, and the urgent need for them to provide the necessary information to be able to continue accessing their accounts. Users using these to sign in to their Tom's account will absolutely need to confirm their email addresses with us, since they won't be able to log in after we roll out these changes.We're sorry for the temporary inconvenience and to trouble you with this, but at Tom's we are committed to practicing what we preach on the subject of digital security - no matter how momentarily inconvenient. And we acknowledge that our users are smart enough and savvy enough to recognize good faith on our end to live up to the standards we help set.Thanks for your cooperation in this - security is everyone's responsibility, so please be sure to make this change as soon as possible.Yours,Joe PishgarSr. Community Manager, Tom's Community

Update, 8/12/15, 8:50am PT: Here are some further details from the community mavens to help clarify the process for everyone:

1)      Some users are already verified and are misinterpreting the above: If the displayed email address is correct, and you do not have an option to send out a verification email, you don’t need to do anything.

2)      The "green check mark" we mentioned in the instructions is NOT visible on the account page. We understand that this can be confusing; the green check is only visible if you visit your profile page: http://www.tomsguide.com/community/profile

3)      Users can also check their list of badges for the "Verified Email" badge to check on their verification status. You can hit this link to see updated instructions, too.

Seth Colaner is the News Director at Tom's Hardware. Follow him on Twitter @SethColaner. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.