PA Hillclimb

Several people have mentioned problems where they sign into the forum, and when they try to make a post, the forum signs them out. I think Dave Yeager had this problem a while back.

Most recently, I worked with Ron Mann who was having this problem on several different computers and several different browsers. My first question to him was "what browser are you using, and what version". To find this out, most browsers have an "About" option under the Help menu that will show the version.

Ron was running the latest version of Internet Explorer on one computer, and the latest version of Firefox on others. Both browsers (and these exact versions) worked for me without any problems. When you are running the latest, or close to the latest version of the browser, the browser is probably not the problem.

We fixed it for Ron on Internet Explorer 8 by clearing out all cookies / temporary internet files. To do this in Internet Explorer 8, select Tools > Internet Options, and in the Browsing History section click on Delete. Make sure "Temporary Internet files" and "Cookies" are selected on the window that comes up, then click on Delete again. In Firefox, choose Tools > Clear Recent History, click on Details, make sure "Cookies" is checked, and click Clear Now. Other browsers / versions will have the option in a similar location.

My best educated guess for the reason this worked for Ron is that there was an old cookie out there with old session information, and every time he navigated to a new page, it checked the cookie, saw an old timestamp, decided the session was expired and logged him out.

He is using the latest version of Firefox and has the same problem. Not sure yet if clearing cookies / temporary internet files fixes it for Firefox -- will post back later when I know more.

Grace

Thanks Grace, this is good information and I'm glad you were able to help Ron. Outdated/corrupted cookies can indeed be a problem every once and awhile, it must be common enough that this forum includes a link at the bottom of every page to help. If you look at the bottom right there is a link to "Delete all board cookies" which might be a good step before deleting cookies for every website.

Thanks again!

That "Delete all board cookies" link is interesting, I never noticed it before. Yes, I'd definitely try that first before using the browser option to remove all cookies.

I suspect that the problem happens for people who log into the forum and never log out. I don't know this to be a fact yet, just seems to be the general pattern.

Grace

Thanks Grace and Matt.
This looks like a good solution.