WHAT is the problem with this board's authentication server?

Well, just what the damn hell is it?

Sorry for sounding so pissed, but you know, I’m getting real tired of this. It’s been a recurring thing, sometimes worse, sometimes not so bad, for a long time now.

I just posted a post. Upon re-loading the thread, I found myself logged out. (That almost always happens to me. I pretty much have to re-login every time I want to post something.) And then I wanted to edit my post. It took me about twelve log-in attempts to succeed in logging in again, by which time my edit window was expired. That’s when it’s a real pisser.

The symptom: I attempt to log in. After entering my username and password at the upper-right-corner of the thread page, I am then back at the page with the thread where I was – but I’m still not logged in. Rinse, repeat, many times. Sometimes it takes 2 tries. Sometimes 3 tries. Sometimes 10 tries. I definitely know my password by heart after all the times I type it, that’s for sure. Sometimes I just give-the-fuck up. :mad:

Or, alternatively, I click on the Quote button. Then I get the larger log-in form. But after entering my name and password, I just get the log-in form again. And again. And again. And again.

I’ve mentioned this repeatedly here in ATMB. It got really really bad for a while earlier this year, when the whole board was falling apart in general. Then Jerry re-built whatever he re-built, and the problem went away (mostly) for quite a while. Lately I’ve been seeing more of it again.

Like some of the ghosts in Ghostbusters this one seems to disappear for spells of time, only to re-appear periodically and haunt the guests. It gets really obstructive at times.

(ETA: IIRC, at one point TubaDiva made the ANSI-standard suggestion that it must just be something goofy about my system or browser. But I think there were other users mentioning the same complaint too.)

(ETA 2: I’ve tried clearing all cookies, which sometimes seems to have helped. But sometimes not. So it’s hard to tell if that has anything to do with anything.)

While you seem quick to blame the SDMB, it really sounds more like a cookie problem on your end to me.

What OS and browser are you using (and what version)? Are you running anything that would interfere with cookies? Do you have cookies disabled?

You can try clearing out your cookies and your browser cache. Note that passwords for other sites will probably be stored in cookies as well, so make sure you know all of your passwords and other info before you go wiping your cookies.

I used to get this problem a lot too. A good “workaround” is to check the little box on the login page to keep yourself logged in. Then, once you do manage to get logged in, you will stay logged in and will not keep getting automatically logged out for “inactivity” while you are composing a post, or whatever. Even if you are away from the site for days at a time, you will remain logged in (until you clear your cookies). It might be a good idea to pre-emptively clear out cookies before trying this, but it probably is not necessary.

It does not exactly solve the problem, but it avoids it, for the most part. It is rarely an issue for me now I do this.

My thoughts as well. Something is clearing or resetting your cookies, or they’re just in an odd state and need to be reset.

As a matter of fact, I do clear all cookies and cache early and often and regularly. I have my browser configured to clear almost everything every time I quit it. Almost always, when I finish looking at one site and go to another site, I do so by first going to my “home page” (which is about:blank), clearing cache and cookies, then going to a different site. (Thus, I rarely have multiple tabs open, unless they are all at the same web site.)

And when I have SDMB trouble like this, yes I do sometime try clearing cookies. Maybe engineer_comp_geek and njtt and Telemark didn’t read my OP too closely, since I mentioned this in my ETA2 (but hey, thanks for trying anyway). It seems to help just often enough to make me think there might be something to that, but still not always. And I NEVER even try to stay logged in at any sites, which would never work for me anyway since I clear cookies all the time. I keep my browser so clean you could eat off of it.

And, by the way, as I’ve mentioned many times, I ALWAYS keep Javascript disabled except when I actually need and want to use it. (For example, I turn it on when I want to open spoiler boxes.)

Why would this suddenly start happening just sometimes? And if it’s a problem with stale cookies, why would multiple login attempts in a row eventually succeed (usually)? I don’t have exactly this problem logging into other sites.

I am using an old mochine with an old operating system (Ubuntu 9.10) and an old browser (Firefox 3.6.9). Yes, I do have lots of problems with many sites, as they have begun using all sorts of newer code that doesn’t work on this machine. But I know what those problems are (HTML messed up formatting, lots of Javascript-heavy stuff not working or not loading at all) and they tend to be predictable and consistent and I can live with them. Trouble logging into any other sites is one problem I never otherwise have.

Addendum: It would be nice, at least, if the vBulletin software could at least display some kind of error message when a login fails like this, instead of just displaying the login screen again (or just taking me back to the thread page, still un-logged-in). In contrast, when I enter my correct username with an incorrect password (which I just tried doing), I do get a cogent message:

But in the complaint of this thread, there is no indication whatsoever of what went wrong. Unhelpful.

Some additional information:

Some links to a few prior threads, by me and others, having login troubles:

In the following thread, I report a bit of “original research” I did: I looked at the source of a page, and found that the login status is encoded in hidden fields in the page as delivered to me:

Trouble loggin in (or staying logged in)? A partial work-around. - About This Message Board - Straight Dope Message Board (See post #2.)

And just now, I tried an additional experiment: I signed in, then cleared all cookies, then clicked on a thread to open another page. This succeeded, and I was still signed in! This must prove that login status is NOT recorded in a cookie! The hidden fields in the page itself (mentioned above) must contain the complete information necessary to stay logged in as one navigates from one page to another.

ETA: There are a lot of threads complaining about all that trouble when the server was bolluxed up a few months ago. But note the first link above was from 2010, and somewhere in that thread also, TubaDiva comes in to acknowledge that there is server trouble.

Ditto. It’s how I solved a similar problem last year.

Senegoid, take a risk. Quit clearing your cache and cookies, and enable JavaScript for 24/36/48 hours. Upgrade your browser. I think you are overdoing the security a wee bit too much, and then some.

Well, I also have an old Win XP mochine with Firefox 19.0 – Do you think that might be new enough? Or at least different enough?

If it’s a problem with running Javascript or not, or using an old browser, I don’t understand why it would be happening only sometimes.

Senegoid, did you ever consider that clearing cookies frequently might be causing the problem?