Personal TinyCats | Temporary Homepage Pause

We are temporarily pausing homepage access for Personal TinyCat accounts only (free accounts for friends and family). All Volunteer and Paid Staff accounts should be unaffected.

We are fighting bots again, and we need to make sure that public-facing libraries can function while we update our approach to the increasing weight from bot traffic.

I know this is inconvenient, even if temporary. We'll get Personal TinyCats back up as soon as possible. In the meantime, although homepage access is paused on Personal accounts, they can still access LibraryThing and TinyCat admin pages.

Thank you so much for your patience, and please let me know if you have questions.

>1 ZephCraven: Ah, that was a surprise. But it's ok. Do your worst to the bots!

>2 bnielsen: Aye aye @bnielsen! 🫡

Personal TinyCat accounts now have access to the catalog homepage by logging in.

For the time being, Personal homepages (only) are password protected, so you need to sign in to view or search them with your main LibraryThing/TinyCat account credentials.

This is a temporary phase, as we work against bot traffic. The next phase will include letting Personal accounts share their libraries with friends / family again. Thank you for your patience in the meantime!

So to clarify, to give friends and family access to our personal libraries at this time, they will need the password that will give them administrative access to the library as well?

>5 demille.fam: They can see your library at https://www.librarything.com/catalog/demille.fam, just not in TinyCat.

Thank you for sharing this. I will temporarily use this.

We don't recommend sharing your admin password with anyone else, no. We are working on rolling out a way to share Personal accounts with your friends and family now! Thank you for your patience; we have to tread carefully with password adjustments as you can imagine, but I'm sorry it's been a few days already.

Update:
Personal TinyCat accounts can now share their homepage with friends and family again! Simply set a "catalog view password" under your Basics settings: https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/general. Share that password with anyone whom you wish to visit your catalog. This will not log them in as a patron, but will let them see and search your catalog like normal.

Alternatively, if you enable Restrict Catalog Access from your Patron Accounts settings, or have already done so, that will work just as it did before in place of this "catalog view password" setup. Remember, that Restrict Catalog Access mirrors your login settings from that Patron Accounts settings page and does indeed sign patrons into their accounts, with the permissions you have set up for your patrons.

TinyCat Admins can sign in as they always have, from the padlock icon or the https://www.librarycat.org/admin page.

Paid Staff and Volunteer TinyCat accounts should still be unaffected.

We still expect this to be a temporary setup, while we mitigate bot traffic on TinyCat. Thank you for your patience in the meantime!

Not sure if this is because of the above mentioned issues but my All-Volunteer account is not allowing me (or anyone) to view my library or patrons to sign in. The link says "ACCESS DENIED" and the only way i can view it is by going to librarycat.org and signing in with my admin account. But there is no option for patrons to view or sign in or anything.

Is there a fix for this or is this a known issue??

>10 sheril.brasher: I am facing the same issue. Is there anything I can / should do? I also have a volunteer account.

>10 sheril.brasher: >11 footnotesdxb: Please try to access again now - we cleared some blocks that had accumulated during the latest bot wave so you should be able to access again. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Thank you so much for all of your help.

We're lifting the password restrictions on Personal TinyCat homepages for now. You may see that it is temporarily turned back on if we experience a spike in bot traffic—otherwise, folks can visit your Personal homepages like normal.