During the outage, I could read the Board without being signed in. I saw this thread, so tried to create a sock of my own, thinking that would work like it did for the OP. But I couldn’t. There was something called Image Verification, but no image would appear for me to verify.
I had thought of this method around the log-in but to be frank I was just too lazy.
I was gonna go with Tube.
Please delete the Happy Fun Sock account I made but was unable to log in with.
Time to put the crusty thing back in the drawer as they say.
The best I could do was “Sock2U”. I didn’t even bother.
Actually, “Sockit2U” would have been pretty good. 
My sock account wouldn’t sign on, either. I guess that only makes me guilty of attempted sockery
Ah, so only the punishment is crucifixion instead of inverted crucifixion then.
Man, how boring am I? I figured the board was down, and I’d just wait. Didn’t even occur to me to try to create a sock. I coulda been “Slow Moving Sock”, I coulda been a contender!
Until the next time you log onto the Happy Fun Ball website and their various lovely models? 
i too am guilty of attempted sockery. But even my new sock was locked out. I’m jealous of you successful socks & don’t know why you were granted special privileges denied to the rest of us.
Yes, it made a mockery of us.
Me, too. And mine was a sock that would have made a big pan of cashew fudge for all of us to eat while we waited for the board to come back up. 
Moderator Note
Don’t worry, we won’t be banning folks or punishing them in any way for socking while they were having difficulties.
Some of our moderator controls are not working properly, most likely a result of the extra protections that were put into place to get the board back up and running. We will remove the posting privileges from the socks once we get all of our moderator controls working properly again. Until then, please do not use the sock accounts that you created.
If you still cannot access your main SDMB account at all, please let us know.
If you are getting logged out and need to constantly re-login, we are aware of that issue. I don’t know if the tech folks will get to it over the weekend, but hopefully it will be fixed soon.
I was able to log in this morning, no problem. Then for the past 4 hours or so I got the same message I got all day yesterday “Invalid username/pw. You have tried to log in too many times & are locked out for 15 minutes” or something to that effect.
When I logged in with the sock I created yesterday it said “Welcome Sock 2” then took me to the main board, but the username & password fields were empty, so I wasn’t really logged in.
I know it’s being worked on…just providing more symptoms, so TPTB can figure out how to solve it.
Banned on the run!
This, in itself, is something that has been complained of many many times over the past few years.
Sign in, get the message “Welcome, whoever-you-are”, then you find you aren’t signed in after all.
In the past, every time this began to happen more frequently, it seemed to be an early warning sign that the board performance was deteriorating, and a re-index or other such board maintenance was needed.
FTR sockyfuzz2 was me, for all the good it did.
I was going to use SockeyeMan, but figured the reference would be lost without the context of my actual username. And not that funny even with context.
Or at least the sock was, as it should rightfully have been.
I just tested to see what would happen, and it let me get past the initial screen to enter the user name and password, with the transition screen “Thank you Sock of Christmas Past” for signing in" or whatever it says, only to get screen saying I am denied access because of being banned for being a sock.
It makes me wonder how people who get really banned feel.