Losing access

These feel identical while they are happening. The screen is the same, the frustration is the same, and the instinct in all four cases is to try harder, which helps in none of them.

The board publishes 3 addresses, and the distance tiles show that beyond the shared opening they have essentially nothing in common. They are separate strings pointing at separate places.

That is what makes trying another one a real action rather than a repetition. It is the single most informative thing to do when access disappears, because it separates the first category from the second immediately: if another address gives you a working login screen, the address was the problem and your details are fine.

1. Try the other addresses in the set. Cheap, fast, and it splits the problem in half.
2. If none of them loads at all, the problem is not about details and there is nothing to do at a login screen.
3. If one loads and your details are rejected, the address was never the issue and no other address will help either.
4. If your copy was ever typed rather than pasted, check it against the published set before concluding anything.
5. Stop. Waiting is the only remaining action and it is more effective than any of the alternatives.

Do not go looking for a new address in this state. It is the worst possible moment: you want it to work, you are inclined to accept the first thing that resolves, and the careful comparison you would normally do feels like an obstacle.

This is why the panel on storing addresses argues for keeping all of them, considered, in advance. The whole point of that habit is to make sure the frustrated version of you never has to make a decision about sources.

It cannot tell you whether an address is working. No probing happens here, on any page, ever. It cannot tell you anything about accounts, recovery, or what a service does when details stop working, because it has no access to any of that.

What it can do is print the set unchanged and describe how the strings relate to each other, which is what makes trying a second one a sensible step rather than a guess.

Losing access looks like a route problem and is usually reasoned about as one. It is placed here because the useful distinction is between the address and the account, and that distinction is a session question rather than a network one.

Once you have established which side the problem is on, the rest follows. The address side has the set as a remedy. The account side has nothing this board can offer, and saying so is more useful than a page of general advice that would apply to any service anywhere.

Everything above assumes a sudden failure, because that is what people notice. The other version is slower and much more common: nothing fails, you simply stop for a few months, and when you return the stored address does not work and you have forgotten where you got it.

That is not a technical failure at all. It is a filing failure, and it happens because the address was stored without any note of where it came from. A string on its own tells you nothing about its provenance, and provenance is the only thing that helps when you have to replace it.

The fix is small and worth doing when you first store the set: keep a line beside it saying where it came from. Not a judgement about whether the source was good, just a record of what it was. Your future self will be trying to reconstruct exactly that, in a hurry, with nothing to go on.