The login screen

Almost everything that can go wrong on the way to a nexus market login produces the same experience: a screen asking for details, and the details not working. A mistyped address that landed somewhere unexpected, a password that is wrong, a service having a problem, an account that no longer exists. All of it arrives as a form that does not accept you.

That convergence is why this panel exists in a section about sessions rather than in the route section. By the time you are looking at a login screen, the route already succeeded at something, and the question has become which something.

Look at the address bar. Not the front of it, which reads correctly for every address in the set and for anything built to resemble them. The 51 characters after the shared opening are where a difference would appear.

Doing this before entering details rather than after is the entire value of the habit. Afterwards, the details have already been typed into whatever is in front of you, and no amount of checking undoes that.

It takes a few seconds and almost nobody does it, because a login screen feels like an arrival rather than a decision point. Treating it as a decision point is the single most useful adjustment on this panel.

• Whether you are where you think you are. A form is the easiest thing on the internet to reproduce.
• Why your details were rejected. The message is deliberately unspecific and there is nothing behind it to interrogate.
• Whether the problem is yours or the service. Both produce a rejection.
• Whether trying again will help. Repetition is the least informative action available and the one people take first.

1. Check the address bar past the shared opening before typing anything.
2. If it does not match your stored copy, stop entirely. Do not type details into it and do not try to work out what happened while it is open.
3. If it does match, try once, carefully, and stop after one attempt.
4. If that fails, try a different address from the set and check its bar the same way.
5. If all three behave the same, the problem is more likely to be at the service end than in your details, and nothing you do at a login screen will settle it.

Because that is the data available, and here it is directly relevant rather than tangentially so. The tiles say how much of the address in your bar is decoration that always matches, how much carries information, and how many of the characters belong to the set the eye trades.

That last one matters at a login screen specifically. You are checking under mild time pressure, having already committed to arriving, which is the worst combination for a visual comparison. Knowing that is a reason to compare against a stored copy rather than against memory.

It cannot describe any particular login screen, because it has no screenshots and has never seen one. It cannot say what a genuine one looks like, and any site claiming to would be describing something it could not verify either.

It also cannot tell you whether a rejection means a service problem. That would need probing, which this site does not do anywhere, on any page, for any reason.

Should I try my details twice?

Once is enough to establish that they were rejected. Repeating tells you nothing new and each attempt is another set of details typed into something you have not established the identity of.

Does a familiar looking page mean I am in the right place?

No. Appearance is the cheapest thing to copy. The address bar is the only thing on the screen that is not part of the page.