Cookie problem - expiring repeatedly

[Myaj]

Hi all. I've seen both here and on the phpbb boards a few people scattered here and there having this issue with the board refusing to remember people once this portal was installed.

In my case, this portal was the very first mod I've done to my brand new phpbb3 install, everything worked great before then. As soon as I installed the portal, Firefox stopped asking me if I wanted it to remember the password, and from that point on, every time I leave the page, no matter if I click the "remember me" on the forum itself (browser no longer asks me), I have to log in again.

I thought it was just a bug on my laptop, but testing has shown it happens on any computer I try, in Firefox or IE, and is happening to other people as well. Our board just went "live" this past week, so I'd like to get this fixed ASAP if possible.

Before I get into the details.. I do want to say, other than this, EXCELLENT portal! Easy to install and use, thank you SO much! Worked much better than the "other" portal I tried out on my other board.

Background info on my board: phpbb3 3.0.4, Prosilver, Board 3 Portal v1.0.2. The only other mod done to my board other than color and image tweaks was just yesterday I did the Anti Bot Question mod, but this issue was happening prior to that mod. I'm not a very experienced/knowledgable phpbb coder, but I can usually get through the instructions, etc okay, so I'll try to get you all the info you might need to help me up front here.

I'm 99.9% sure this issue is due to this mod, since there really isn't much else I've done to the board The only thing I can think of that is really "different" about this board than any other I have, is that this one is a parked domain.. my main domain is www.hoofprintsacrosswi.com (site not really in use, but does have an active phpbb3 forum at www.hoofprintsacrosswi.com/forum).. this one is www.skmhta.com, so I guess technically its located www.hoofprintsacrosswi.com/skmhta.. is there anything about it being a parked domain that could cause this? For what its worth, the main site, www.hoofprintsacrosswi.com/forum DOES retain my log in info just fine, but I'm running a different portal on that site (one that kind of sucks I might add, for someone who's not a coder).

Yes, I have refreshed the theme and purged the cache.

I have checked the cookie settings in the ACP:
cookie domain: .skmhta.hoofprintsacrosswi.com (this is where I'm wondering might be the problem?)
cookie name: phpbb3_i4vhy
cookie path: /

When I go into my temp internet files on IE or Firefox, there is NOTHING listed for this site, by either the skmhta name or eve the phpbb3 or i4vhy names. I do have cookies for www.hoofprintsacrosswi.com, and I've deleted those just in case, no help there.

I have double and triple checked my functions.php file, as was recommended on the release post over on the phpbb3 forum.. I can attach the file if anyone wants to double check it I guess?

I've also double checked my overall header for the L_Portal or whatever that was.

About the only other thing I did, and this was just recently and long after the not remembering the log in info started, was I wanted my domain www.skmhta.com to go directly to the portal. This is quite confusing and there's tons of people asking how to do it (might want to add the answer to the knowledgebase).. I couldn't get anything to happen with that .htaccess file at my root, so I ended up deleting that and my old index page, and moving portal.php to my root.. so that's how I have it set up so my domain does directly to the portal page. I don't think this would cause this issue, and the issue was happening before I did it, but wanted to mention it just in case.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. The people I set this forum up for have spent years on Yahoo mailing lists and many are dragging their feet at the change, while others are begging for the change.. but if the ones who don't want to change have something as silly to argue about such as "when we were on Yahoo I never had to log in every single time, it remembered me..." they're going to really fight harder.. and of course, it makes me look bad that I can't get it fixed

Thank you thank you!

[Kevin]

Hi Myaj,
hard to guess why this error occurs. On all forums i have the portal installed (4 domains), i dont have this issue.
Surfing your sites and watching my cookies during that, i saw that http://www.skmhta.com/ (and /forum too) doesn't set any cookie.
http://www.hoofprintsacrosswi.com/skmhta/ as well.
But http://www.hoofprintsacrosswi.com/forum/ does.

So i think this issue can be caused by two possibilities: the movement of portal.php outside the forum root, or - what i do think might be the problem:

cookie domain: .skmhta.hoofprintsacrosswi.com (this is where I'm wondering might be the problem?)

Try playing around with it, watching your cookies. I would suggest to set .skmhta.com
Additionally to test: have you tried different browsers? Is your cache directory writable (Chmod 777)?

Sorry that i cant tell you a clear solution, but its hard to tell if i cant reproduce it. But I still don't think that it is directly portal related. This sounds like a typical cookie or (missing) SID problem.

Cheers

Kevin

[Myaj]

That's kind of what I am thinking as well, but I don't know enough to really know.. you know?

Yes, I have tried it in both Firefox and IE, different versions of IE as well, different computers, different accounts. All have the same result. Every other phpbb forum I use remembers me.. but this is the only one that I know of that is a parked domain on an account that has another phpbb3 forum running. Which is what I think is causing a problem.

If I didn't get any responses, my next step was to try to change the cookie setting to just .skmhta.com, but my main worry is that everyone who's already been on the board then won't be able to log in (had that problem with a different forum, changed the path to try to fix an issue and suddenly everyone was having major problems due to stored cookies).

But if it hasn't been saving the cookies in the first place, then it won't have anything to conflict with, right? So worth a try.

Checking the cache folder right now... made sure its set to 777, purged the cache from the ACP, and navigated away from the page, I was logged out again when I went back. So that's not the issue.


Oh shoot, correction here, that I just realized...
I did not move portal.php from the forum root, its still there. What I did move was index.php to the skmhta root, and deleted the .htaccess from there. But again, this problem was happening for a few weeks prior to making any change to make the portal page my "home" page. Prior to that it just went to a quick and dirty "under construction" index.htm page.

So, I'm off to try changing the setting to .skmhta.com.. I'll be back in a few to let you know if it worked.

[Myaj]

Thank you so much! That did fix the problem, perfectly.

I changed it to just plain .skmhta.com instead of reflecting the "main" domain, purged the cache, left the forum, came back and I was logged out again.. logged in again so it could save the info, then tested again, and now its keeping me logged in

Wonderful, and thank you yet again.

[Kevin]

Puuuh, great!

But I still don't think that it is directly portal related. This sounds like a typical cookie or (missing) SID problem.

So this is still the standard. And i think that we can say that the portal is not causing such errors. Everytime it has been related to the cookie settings.

Anyway, great that it works now fine for you and thank you for the feedback! Have a nice weekend!

[Myaj]

I know, that's what it sounds like.

But the board was keeping me logged in just fine UNTIL I installed the portal. Go figure, I don't know enough to know why it would do it, I'm just thrilled that its working now *whew*