Member having trouble logging in!

[Elentari]

This is the pm that one of my staff sent me regarding a members problem logging in. I am currently running 2.2.5

Twice, in the past 24 hours she has found it almost impossible to log in to the forum successfully. And I know this happened to her at least once before -- a couple of weeks ago.

She says that the login screen comes up. She enters her name and password and then the thank you for logging in screen comes up just fine. BUT -- the next screen she sees is the login screen again. She has tried clearing all her cookies on internet explorer, and rebooting many many times. Then, for no apparent reason -- she finally gains access. Go figure. But she has had to try as many as 15 to 20 times.

I saw it was happening again this morning -- but she still hasn't managed to get onto the forum yet. I can tell it's going on because she shows up as being on the forum but isn't really there. And also because we have about 15 guests sign on in about 10 minutes time.

[MUG]

Do you have the cookie domain and path properly set in the Admin CP?

[Elentari]

In what way?

Every other member is logging in and out just fine, by the way.

I'm not sure what you mean about cookies and all though, lol

edit :
Ive got the cookie domain set to
.christiansurvivors.com
and the path set to / as there is only one forum on the domain.
Are those the right settings?

[Steve Machol]

If it's just one user then have her manually delete the cookies for your forums. To do this in IE 6.0:

Tools -> Internet Options -> Temporary Internet Files -> Settings -> View Files

Then search for the individual cookies for your domain and delete them all. The name should be in the form of:

Cookie:[email protected]
and
Cookie:username@www.yoursite.com

...and any derivatives of the above. Then highlight the individual cookies and delete each one found. After this, close all browser windows and restart IE.

[Paul]

Re: Member having trouble logging in!

Originally posted by Elentari
This is the pm that one of my staff sent me regarding a members problem logging in. I am currently running 2.2.5

Interesting...

I just received a similar message myself. I'm running 2.2.6. I attributed the problem to cookie corruption with Internet Explorer, but if this continues I'd be interested to hear about it. The only thing odd I saw in her nickname that might be related to this is the presence of a space in the username, but even then I'm fairly certain from memory that only the userid # is stored in the cookie.

Paul

[Palmer ofShinra]

OK... this is the exact issue a dozen of our users have been having for the last couple days....

However, I'm asking you to check the ISP used by the members having login troubles...

Because in our case, every single member having trouble is using AOL.

Location and version don't seem to be an issue, as some are in California and others in Massachusets...

One is using AOL 5, while most are on 7 or 8.

So yeah... this is a pain in the royal #$%^

Do you guys have ANY clue whatsoever?

This happened spontaneously, no changes of any sort made to our board.

[Elentari]

Yep, this girl is using AOL too! I was actually wondering if it could be anything to do with that.

She even tried making a new account, and the same thing happened with that too.

She has deleted all her cookies - but Ill get her to try it manually too.

I wonder if it is an AOL issue, then. Interesting that it seems to be affecting those using it!!! We are the same - no changes made recently to the board - it just happened!

[Paul]

The person in question on my forum is an AOL user as well. However, we have had no other reports of such a problem occuring with any other user, including those using AOL. Considering the size of AOL's userbase, this may be entirely coincidental.

Paul

[Steve Machol]

The problem may be the AOL browser not the AOL accounts themselves. Most AOL users on my forums use Internet Explorer.

[Palmer ofShinra]

Most of our AOL users use IE standalone, rather than the AOL browser.

Still no luck

[Steve Machol]

That's strange. I have lots of AOL members myself and no one is having this problem.

[Elentari]

Originally posted by smachol
That's strange. I have lots of AOL members myself and no one is having this problem.

Yes it IS strange - and also pretty frustrating for the member its happening to! LOL

[Castel]

I can confirm this as well, this has been happening on my forum quite often lately (2.2.6) to long time users or newer users.

Even when they completely empty their cookie and temp internet files directories it doesn't solve the problem, and then a few days later then can log in again with problems all of a sudden.
I haven't checked every single ISP for these users, but the once I have are all AOL just as mentioned in previous posts.

I have never been able to duplicate this problem using the user's name and pass, so it is somewhat of a mistery.

The last person to report this also mentioned that non of his friends could login to their account using his computer at home (AOL user) but it worked fine from school (edu account). It definately looks like and AOL problem

[Elentari]

I wonder if AOL would pay any attention if we emailed tghem with specifics?

[Paul]

I should mention that the person who came to me with these problems experienced it from multiple machines. I do not know for a fact if she was using AOL on all of those machines, but it did make the idea of a corrupted cookie seem a little far fetched.

I'm not sure if there's an RFC or something for creating cookies, but perhaps vBulletin doesn't follow something to the letter?

Paul