Login/Post Issues: You May Need a New Cookie

[Carl]

I'm working on getting us upgraded in the background here. This weekend if you have issues, it may be that the cookie associated with your login is no longer recognized by the server. You do NOT need to nuke ALL your cookies to clear it. For Chrome it's possible to go to

Settings > Site Settings > Cookies > See All Cookies and Site Data > Type in Carl and nuke all cookies associated with that name, unless you are customer to some obscure Carl's bank and would nuke your login authorization, this should be foolproof.

The issue is that your browser may tell you that you're logged in, but not be logged in at all.

This may be a recurring problem for 2-3 days as I get issues ironed out. Any other issues that just appeared? Let me know here. I'm forewarning of them even though I just rolled us back to a previous version while I rest. I'll put the new version back up tonight and check back periodically to make sure it's working.

[Carl]

Just fixed the mystery issue with sessions, I believe! SUPER sorry for all the trouble gang, but sometimes you need more samples of people with problems for them to crop up. I confirmed logins were fine until they weren't, but I hunted down the problem and think it's resolved.

[Carl]

While I have attention I want to get the word out I'll be working on further software upgrades on the actual forum itself with a planned maintenance during late night hours sometime in the next 48h. If it's to be delayed i'll let you know. I'll announce this for a time before posting so that anyone who might try to post during that time will be forewarned. The forum will go into maintenance mode and be visible but you won't be able to post. It won't be a long maintenance or I'd directly state a time.

I'll share a bit of irony. I actually attempted to avoid any downtime for the issue we had this past 24h. In attempting to do that, a file got changed and resulted in all these troubles. If I had just gone for it the regular way, it would have only taken about 15 mins. Unfortunately it's my least favorite kind of lesson, one that will likely never come in handy.

[oshizu]

Hello, Carl!
Just a short note to check whether I can post again.

Edited to add: And I can!
Thank you so much for all that you do to keep our community (and wonderful guides) up, running, and accessible!

[Deklitch]

When I saw the the subject title of Carl's post, well starting from "You", anyway, I thought he's a webmaster, a youtube star and a chef? Then I reread the entire subject and deleted my address for my cookie.

That is why for the last couple of days my usual computer has dropped my account out and I have to reenter my user name/password, I presume.

[Carl]

So... something in the system changed that file back overnight, woke up and found the solution right away but, I'll have to investigate how this could have changed on its own.

[Metropolis Man]

Just checking to see if your solution fixed my posting issue.

EDIT: yep. Thank you, Carl

[Rainbow Dash]

Posted by: Carl« on: August 29, 2019, 12:28:25 PM »So... something in the system changed that file back overnight, woke up and found the solution right away but, I'll have to investigate how this could have changed on its own.

Oh, I thought you were doing maintenance work, I couldn't post either that night but everything is fine now, thanks for fixing the problem @Carl

[Carl]

Thanks for being so understanding, everyone. I've found myself deep in it again tonight. I look forward to having this work done. I didn't get to the actual forum upgrade yet, because I want everything else sorted out first. There are many parts involved to getting things modernized and working properly and they all have something or another wrong with them. I feel lucky things have been as stable as they are to be honest.

[Carl]

Amidst the downtimes I got a couple messages about this, so I'm sure a lot of people noticed huge instability today. Not planned at all. Something bad enough happened that it immediately put me into panic mode and I become focused only on that one thing. Looks like my job still isn't done with these upgrades.

i should've said something, but honestly when the page is down I don't have much of a way to tell anyone and I have 0 idea how it's going to go. I found a line of code that caused my entire site to disappear from Google, and that's... apocalyptic if you can imagine. It resulted in the page breaking after a time (for yet unknown reasons), but cloudflare still served it. However it gave me something to work with an I'm removing it from all pages right now.

[Carl]

Now that I've got that pruned and am calmed down a bit, I feel a need to apologize. This type of crazines shouldn't happen in production. I can't guarantee it won't, but it's a tough demonstration of how a service like cloudflare can help/hinder you. With browser/server/cloudflare all caching this managed to escape detection for 2 full days at least. What's crazy is even with our local browser cache cleared and cloudflare disabled Playalot and I were still seeing it serve the page fine. IT took a long time before we saw it actually broken. I'm lucky I even noticed.

Thankfully Google is putting us right back into search. The site's comments system had a bit of code in it that was not compatible with newer php... which is also a problem with the forum. In that case, I was able to nuke the code as it's not important for the guide. But the forum's built on older php and throws lots of errors on the new version. Having to support both is adding a layer of complexity to everything. I may eventually put the forum into its own safe haven with legacy/stable software because it's extremely sensitive to changes.

[Shewolf13]

@Carl

Thank you so much for all you do!  I only ever dealt with some backend stuff for modding forums and even that was chaotic. I can only imagine the work that goes into it.

[Deklitch]

@Carl I lost an update to my Power of 10 story. It was about 10:20pm last night my time (approx 7 1/2 hours ago now) when I hit post. I first of all got a 504 bad gateway error message then it went into a screen that mentioned cloudflare on it. I was off to bed at the time, so I couldn't repost then.

I have reposted it now and it went through without an issue. Probably not as good as my original, but isn't that always the case with such things?

I feel for you with regards to old vs new php code and incompatibility between them, I really do. We're fortunate the forum code has apparently played so nicely for so long and that we have you as  a webmaster.

[Carl]

So we made it about 6 weeks to have this come up again somehow today (people unable to post due to sessions). I mean, that's a decent length of time but there's clearly something off. I'll be investigating in the next couple days but the most you should notice is the need to login a couple times.

To be clear I'm talking specifically about posting, you go to a login page issue not 504s. Hopefully people are not having repeat 504 issues since then...

[HelenP]

FYI (because I think it's fixed) I was unable to mark threads as read earlier today.  The error was specifically a session login one.  When I came back to site just now I needed to log in again and have had no problems so far.

Thanks for all you do to keep this forum running, it's greatly appreciated.

[scoed]

Thing are working for me again. Thank you. Earlier today not so much.

[oshizu]

I also had an issue last night where I was unable to log out and got the error message: "Session verification failed. Please try logging out and back in again"
When I came to this post to let you know, I couldn't post either.

I used CCleaner to clean out my cookies, then was able to log out. Or probably you did something in the meanwhile @Carl which fixed my problem.
I'm echoing HelenP's thanks to you for keeping this forum alive and well.

[Carl]

I don't want to speak too soon but I'm fairly confident about this. I think the longstanding issue where this suddenly switches on us should be fixed for good now. The solution is so simple I don't think anyone could have even noticed any issues while I was changing it. I had a breakthrough in understanding it yesterday and put in the fix just now. You may need to login one last time, but should stay logged in as long as you'd like going forward.

[Deklitch]

Thank you Carl! Here, have a cookie, its a magical cookie that is your favourite type of cookie, caters for any and all dietary needs you have while still tasting exactly the way you want it to taste.

[Carl]

@Deklitch So it's a pistachio + white chocolate cookie that manages to combine two of my favorite things and it's high in fiber, riboflavin and potassium. That's actually pretty cool. Thanks. After how hard it was last month I'm pretty happy to have it over with, because in general things are just... stable, and work. I am glad that seems to be the case now