The Right Stuff Forum

[doanet]

A small percentage of AOL users MAY have problems with repeated logouts on this board. A common error message will refer to a 'Invalid Session Error'. According to the phpbb manual:

"phpBB2 uses sessions to keep track of users as they browse the board. These sessions use a combination of a unique session id and the users IP to identify each user. We make use of the IP as an extra safe-guard to help prevent sessions being hijacked (by discovering the unique session id).

"Unfortunately this only works when the users IP is constant as they browse the board. For most users this will be the case. However certain providers route their users via a cluster of proxys. In some cases, particularly AOL this results in different IPs being forwarded as the user moves between pages. We take account of this by not checking the entire IP but only the first "three quads". Again in most cases this will be fine. However again AOL uses IPs which can vary so much that checking only the first two quads results in a fairly static IP being available for session validation."

In plain English, it means that most ISPs give you an IP address that stays the same the entire time you are online. But some AOL services change your IP address as you browse between pages. Phpbb and many other BBS systems see these IP changes as potential hijack attempts. You end up getting logged out sometimes. There's no way around this at present. The situation seems to be unique to a small segment of AOL users. If you are experiencing this error, one possible way around it is to contact your ISP and ask if they can assign you a 'static IP', or an IP address that remains the same each time you logon. A friend of mine pays only $1 extra per month on his Internet access bill for this service. But PLEASE don't send us emails asking us to 'fix it' -we can't! If phpbb comes up with any fixes in future upgrades, we'll apply the fixes, but til then, it's out of our hands.

Rose
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"When you're going through hell, keep going."
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