That darn session verification error

[Chaos he/him]

No highlighters here, yet, despite the multiple copies in my possession. I'll be waiting for the paperback before that's even considered, but that's just me.

Yeah, the hardback is too pretty to deface.

who comprises the staff? and how can one pursue a position as one?

The staff is Rubix (Josh), firstRainbowRose (Mi'chelle), Shivertongue (Will), Ryan, and I. [Note to Josh, has Chris even registered here yet? What a slacker ] Our getting of ARCs is independent of being on the staff of this site.

No i know, I just want to know how one persues staffdom.

If you'll fix the session timeout bug in this here forum, I'd take you. (Seriously. I had to delete cookies twice just to make this post. Frickin' Eric. ;D)

Joking aside, I'm afraid staffdom is by invitation only. You have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is what happened to me.

V_V

Yeah...

One solution is to not have it logged in permanently. I've just been logged in at 60 minutes intervals and it's worked well. But, enough rationalization: it's totally my fault. I must have done something wonky with the skin. I need to post soon that I will do forum maintenance this weekend to see if I can fix it. The forums should work fine, but I'll need to switch to an ugly skin to run a few tests.

Fracking forums. Invisionfree was never this problematic

On the subject of staff members, I'm pretty sure the next staff we'll need would be helpers/moderators on the Wiki, so look for that.

Or have an incredibly useful skill that we can exploit. Such as being able to make awesome code (Ryan), make awesome graphics (myself) or... um... come to think, what does everyone else do?  ???

I break forums. It's like my Talent.

Or, I just theorize a lot This way I can pretend it's a job, right? "Cultivating community" counts as work.

[Ryan he/him]

I'd offer to help, but I've got my hands full with the rest of the site. I actually did take a look at it one day, but the 20 minutes I put into it weren't enough. It's harder to troubleshoot since I don't know everything that's been done since the forums were installed.

What I should have done is just reinstalled from scratch back before we had any forum traffic. But I didn't want to step on your toes, and I did have my hands full with the rest of the site...

[Eerongal he/him]

Yeah...

*snip*

..."Cultivating community" counts as work.

What version of SMF (that's what it looks like) is the site using? I'd heard before of login/cookie problems in 1.1.11, possibly carried over to 2.0, but i dunno if they were ever really cleared up. It could just be an issue with the framework.

Edit: also, what specifically is the issue? i have yet to run into it, so its kinda hard to tap what limited knowledge i have with SMF about it.

[Chaos he/him]

Session Verification Error. Log yourself in permanently and you'll run into it like a day.

[Eerongal he/him]

Session Verification Error. Log yourself in permanently and you'll run into it like a day.

I'm always logged in permanently. I checked it first time i logged in. Haven't had it happen yet, either here at work or at home.

Edit: then again, i only have 7 posts so far.

[Ryan he/him]

I did something that may have fixed it. Time will tell of course. If you experience the issue again, please report it here.

[Chaos he/him]

What did you do, Ryan?

[Ryan he/him]

The first thing I did didn't work. BUT! I have now found the line of code where the error is triggered, which means that I know what conditions cause the error, WHICH MEANS that I can definitely fix it.

If you're curious, what follows is a bunch of nerdery. Here is the code that triggers the error:

	// Verify that they aren't changing user agents on us - that could be bad.
if ((!isset($_SESSION['USER_AGENT']) || $_SESSION['USER_AGENT'] != $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) && empty($modSettings['disableCheckUA']))

So, this is a check to see if the user's User Agent has changed since the session began. There are two conditions that can trigger the error. The first is that the User Agent string is missing from the session; I'm not sure what would cause that.

The second is if the UA string in the session does not match the value provided by the server, which was in turn provided by the client that initiated the request. Now, I'm not 100% sure on this, but this could be caused by the web page preview fetchers of browsers like Safari and Chrome.

Safari uses a separate process to fetch the web page preview images that it displays in the "top sites" page, and I believe that Chrome does the same. This process sends a different UA than the browser it serves, but it shares the same cookies

[Ryan he/him]

It's been a day, and my session is still valid. Not absolute proof, but I'm encouraged, since this hasn't happened before.

[Chaos he/him]

This is indeed good news. Let's see if MY post goes through, since it's been a day for me, too.

EDIT: All praise the mighty Ryan, because it went through. Now to see if it stays that way...

[Ryan he/him]

Also, sorry for giving you a hard time earlier. This wasn't something a non-codemonkey could have solved.

[Chaos he/him]

Pfft, you weren't being hard on me. If you were, uh... I didn't notice!