let us know what you find…
have posted any shortcodes in that one forum? or have other content that may be plugin driven? does it happen on every page in that one forum or just some?
No shortcodes, no plugins…. but this kind of sorted itself without any rhyme or reason, and then cropped up again…
To start with I couldn’t get into one forum (General), all the others were ok. It became clear that it was just a few of the nwer topics, and I managed to eventually get into several of these by a combination of logging in and out, different logins etc. There was one topic – the one that was started from ‘new’ rather than a WP crosspost – and I managed to get into this from work (different IP address). SO I thought we were good to go, and told various people to go get registered and logged in.
A few have managed fine but now there’s one user who seems t have the same problem I have in the past – “Despite having an active account (I can log into my profile if I go to ‘register’ and then ‘log in’) but I can’t actually log into the forum itself as it keeps reverting back to guest (even after I follow ‘log in’ from the forum page).”
Which is what I was getting when I set the forum up (it sorted itself out as I messed with the settings). Of course there may be many more who have just given up on it which is a worry. I’ve not found a FAQ or answer to this one yet, hopefully it is a common/easily sorted problem.
Let me start by explaining that registration, login and logout are not Simple:Press functions or processes. It is the WordPress site a user registers and logs into. Simple:Press is just a plugin that takes the status of the current user from WordPress. We provide optional registration, login/out buttons but all they do is emulate the WP default buttons and call the same code for processing. So – this question is really more of a WordPress question than an SP question.
The only issue that regularly crops up showing this behaviour is when the user is making use of a caching plugin (like wp-cache or wp-total-cache etc). Obviously if a cache plugin is pulling a saved page from a cache it will not show up to date information. Is that the case here?
Thanks – I get the idea that the registrations are happening on the WordPress side and would certainly understand if all users were getting blocked in this way. The way he explains it, he’s actually getting to log in fine via WordPress (as he accesses his profile ok), it’s only when he tries to access a S:P forum that his problems occur.
There is no caching software at work here, though Cloudflare is enabled, but I turned off the recommended caching. It’s more the issue that this is happening for one user and not others – I could investigate by turning off plugins etc but it’s not as if I can coordinate this with a random person somewhere on the web attempting to login again. Was just hoping that this had cropped up before and had been solved!
It’s just one, single user? I would suggest he starts by clearing his browser cache see if that clears it…
he’s done that, and in three separate browsers (also, he’s not logged in before on one username, the other last time would have been on the previous php board 2 years ago!)
He’s going to try from home or phone or whatever though so hopefully I can gather some more data…
yes, very interesting… 
he’s tried from multiple browsers/devices and had no luck. (I should say that he’s had this problem before I installed the RPX login, and then disabled it again)
The results are unfortunately very inconsistent. I’m able to login to WordPress as him (and myself). I can also – pretty much consistently – login with the link that’s at the bottom of every regular ‘blog’ post – “Leave a Reply”.
But even though I am logged in there, if I go to the forum, I get “Please consider registering – Guest”.
In fact, under my own username, I currently can’t post to the forum. Occasionally in the past, I have found that I’m a guest at the main view, but somehow logged in as myself ‘S’, full admin) if I click on general Discussion.
Cache emptied, Cloudflare off (again!), end of tether approaching.
you probably have the option to prevent users from posting as guests on or the guest cookie if multiple users on same computer… you can tweak those on forum – options – member settings…
pretty sure I didn’t have those settings as detailed above. I’m hoping that I have this settled down a little now – I’m going to assume that the guy who couldn’t login has some ‘unique’ aspect to his setup, a corrupt record for some reason. I’ll delete him and start afresh.
It seems that SP isn’t too keen on admin multiply logging in and out, especially if the same admin has logged in the back end to check settings. I can see why that might necessitate a cache deletion, so I’ll just try and be very careful when logging in under different IDs when testing.
Have got the RPX stuff turned on again, hopefully have some people using that and hopefully reporting back with any problems. Then, it’s Cloudflare, a whole new barrel of worms. If you don’t hear back from me either everything’s going great, or the exact opposite…
Thanks
S
Stuart McHugh said
pretty sure I didn’t have those settings as detailed above. I’m hoping that I have this settled down a little now – I’m going to assume that the guy who couldn’t login has some ‘unique’ aspect to his setup, a corrupt record for some reason. I’ll delete him and start afresh.
When it is a one-off user like that I still believe the problem could be more their end than yours…
It seems that SP isn’t too keen on admin multiply logging in and out, especially if the same admin has logged in the back end to check settings. I can see why that might necessitate a cache deletion, so I’ll just try and be very careful when logging in under different IDs when testing.
I really do not understand what you mean here. As I believe I explained already, SP does NOT handle logging in and out. We simply inherit this information from your WordPress system. If you are still having problems maintaining the logged in status from one page to the next – or between admin and front end – then this has to be some sort of environmental issue with either WP plugin code being run, server setup, browser setup, faulty caching or something similar.
Have got the RPX stuff turned on again, hopefully have some people using that and hopefully reporting back with any problems. Then, it’s Cloudflare, a whole new barrel of worms. If you don’t hear back from me either everything’s going great, or the exact opposite… Thanks S
If the problem is environmental then I doubt this will make things any better. Although I still have serious doubts about Cloudflare and would tackle that one first.
The one-off user theory would be fine, except that I am kind of replicating it by logging in and out (or staying logged in) with different usernames.
And I know that WP SP uses WP’s login system. The simple fact is, within my setup, logging in and out of the WP side of things is working fine, but getting in and out of the forum isn’t. I have no doubt that it’s something like WP plugin code (have disabled everything at some point though) faulty caching (deleting the cache seemed to help), browser setup (several different ones tried), or some combination of all of the above, which as you can imagine in a non-professional environment and on a live site is impossible to diagnose fully.
So I’m stuck with the choice of deleting this user and forgetting this ever happened, and then, crossing everything. Cloudflare is off at the moment, am going to have to turn it back on sometime though as I’m getting too many brute force attacks and I am *assuming* that the stats are true i.e. there’d be many more otherwise!
This shouldn’t make any difference but what your cookie settings? Do you allow them?