Login cookies not working when Forum = Home

Involved Joined: Jul 25, 2006 Posts: 354

This seems to really only occur once someone first loads up the website..

In my website, I have 'Forum' as 'Home' (This also makes 'Forum' show up twice on the top bar)

The first time a user (already registered) visits the website on website.com the forum looks as though they are not logged in. The horizontal bar accross the top of the forum informs them to 'Log in' and to 'Login to see private messages' but the User Info block on the side of the website shows them as logged in (and they are).

If the user then visits website.com/modules.php?name=Forums it will show them as logged in and reveal new posts etc.

If they then click 'Home' (Remembering that 'Home' is the 'Forums') but the url returns to website.com) then it will continue to show them as logged in and reveal new posts etc.

It appears that the first time you load website.com the forums appear to not SHOW that you are logged in, even though the website knows you are and you actually are logged in.

This must be a cookie issue that I can fix somewhere in the options?

PLEASE HELP!

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 7:08 pm

Should I have the cookie domain as:

website.com/

or

website.com/modules.php?name=Forums

Involved Joined: Jul 03, 2006 Posts: 273

cookie domain should be .website.com

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 9:09 pm

duck wrote:

cookie domain should be .website.com

Ok I have it set as that, isn't causing the issue.

Why would this happen? :s

Does it matter if you change the Cookie Name?

Has anyone else ever had the /modules.php?name=Forums as their 'Home' on a website and had these issues?

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 11:41 pm

This is becoming more frustrating for users.

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

Posted: Thu Jul 09, 2009 11:40 am

I haven't really delved into this deeply myself but my guess would be in the area of one or 2 options.

Option one you could try is maybe making sure coockie session length is set very high in Forums Admin. Not positive it is related but it could be.

Option 2 for which I don't have a solution yet but it may quite likely be the probable cause is that a user forum session is not initialized yet (or correctly) when landing on home the first time and forums may be using the user sessions for confirming login status. My thinking is when it is home other output is being sent ahead of the session call when forums is in home vs Module. If this is the case then there would be a little more digging and searching thru the code needed to fix this. Something I don't have time for but someone else here might or you yourself could try. But just in case maybe try option one first see if it works?

Posted: Thu Jul 09, 2009 8:25 pm

I have raised the session length to 99999

There must be someone out there who is running the Forum as Home that might have seen this issue, or knows how to fix it!

registered · Posted: Sat Jul 11, 2009 4:03 pm

pan wrote:

There must be someone out there who is running the Forum as Home that might have seen this issue, or knows how to fix it!

Never tried and don't recall ever seeing a *nuke site set up that way. Unfortunately, the forums code is such a tangled web of code, and I haven't the time to try and unravel it. Sorry.

Posted: Sun Jul 12, 2009 5:57 pm

What would happen if I put

/index.php

in this section:

Script path
The path where phpBB2 is located relative to the domain name

At the moment I just have this:

/

Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2009 7:16 pm

Does anyone know what that would do?

Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2009 1:22 am

The path should be set to
/modules/Forums/
because that is where the forum is located.
I will set my test site so it has forums in Home and see what happens.

Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2009 1:31 am

Looks like it could be your theme.
I just tried setting Forums in Home and I can log in, post messages, log out etc etc with no problem.
The only thing I see which I don't really like is the site 'message' being displayed above the forum but there are no duplicate 'Forum' links or anything similar to what you have described. I used the DeepBlue theme for testing.

Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2009 6:08 pm

Guardian2003 wrote:

The path should be set to
/modules/Forums/
because that is where the forum is located.
I will set my test site so it has forums in Home and see what happens.

i know that..

but the question in that part of the forum says The path where phpBB2 is located relative to the domain name

The domain name goes straight to the forum as it is 'Home'

The problem isn't that people can't do all those things you said, it's that when they FIRST go to the URL the forum thinks they aren't logged in BUT THEY ARE. So it doesn't do things like show new posts when there ARE new posts (if you are at website.com) but as soon as you go to website.com/modules.php?name=Forums it all works fine (because u were logged in the whole time)

As soon as they go to a thread or any other section then it continues to then show them as logged in

I am using the default ravennuke theme, the fsubice

i will trial a different script path again

Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2009 9:02 pm

Having the path as '/modules/Forums/' does not fix this issue.

Why is this happening Sad

Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2009 11:55 pm

pan wrote:

i know that..

I don't understand why you put something completely different then?

Quote:

but the question in that part of the forum says The path where phpBB2 is located relative to the domain name

Thats correct..
Your domain name will be something like
www.something.com
so the path relative to that where phpBB is installed is /modules/forums/ - unless of course if you have moved the files.

Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2009 11:58 pm

yea well I have tried both of these ways and it STILL does what im saying

its still not fixed

Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 3:55 pm

What could be causing this other than cookies? :s

I'm at a loss, I can't figure it out

Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 12:02 am

What settings do you have at the moment for your forum?
Can I assume everything was working before you put the Forum as the 'home' module?

Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 12:59 am

yea it was working fine until I made Forum the Home

I have:

General Settings:

Domain name: website.com
Server Port: 80
Script Path: /modules/Forums/

Cookie Settings

Cookie Domain: .website.com
Cookie Name: customword
Cookie Path: /
Session Length: 99999 (as suggested)

Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2009 10:30 pm

I am still having this issue.

Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 12:09 am

Do you have a link to your site so we can check the html being outputted in case that gives us any more clues?
Those settings look correct to me and as I am assuming you have already tried a different theme tehm I'm stumped as I have not been able to reproduce this.

Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 12:43 am

*URL removed as you have it now*

Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 4:17 am

I registered for an account, got the activation email - the url in the activation email is wrong; you have 2 forward slashes after the yoursite.com//
This usually happens if you have a forward dlash at the end of your site url in nuke preferences.
I logged in and posted in your forum
.....modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=5963

The site header menu indicates I'm logged in as only the 'Logout' link is visible.
The forum header menu shows me 'No new messages' which is correct as I'm logged in.

I don't see any duplicated menu's or links so it looks like the problem is stored cookies on the users PC which may need to be cleared.

Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 4:52 am

Please remove the URL from your post.

The duplicate menu is fixed (i edited the navbar php) so don't worry about that issue.

I have also removed the extra / from the preferences (could that of caused the problem?)

You will see next time you go to website.com that the left bar will have you as logged in, but the forum won't recognise it until you go to /modules.php?name=Forums and you won't see all links on the forum like 'view posts since last visit'

Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 6:50 am

I have obfuscated the url in my post, I didn't know it was supposed to be a secret (you could have PM'd me the url).
With the current way that the phpBB forum is integrated, when you put the forum as 'home' you can access it via yourwebsite.com/index.php and as yourwebsite.com/modules.php?name=Forums, this means two seperate cookies are being used (one for each url) but as they are not kept in sync it would seem to make sense that things like 'view posts since last visit' won't work properly as they are cookie dependant - you might see it at one url but not the other. The same thing probably happens when you look at the main forum pages for 'new posts'.

I don't know of a way to fix that and to be honest, it is probably something we wouldn't attempt to fix now that the phpBB 2.x series has been effectively declared dead by the original authors and we may be moving to phpBB 3.z or something else.