As an editor (editor + journal manager role), I regularly remove user accounts for users that have never contributed to the journal and whose mail address returns a delivery failed message. I do this in the dashboard by merging the user into a dummy account. To do this, I go to the user list, search for the user and then choose to log in as this user, so I can check that they have nothing in their archive.
At first it looks successful because I only see the tabs ‘My queue’ and ‘archive’ and not the remaining stuff I see as editor. I then go to the small menu on the top right corner. The userame displayed there is the one I want to look at. But when I choose ‘edit profile’ suddenly my credentials are in the identity tab. I switch to another tab and sure enough, I am still in my own profile.
I cannot reproduce this, but it happens about 1 out of 20 times I try to log in as another user the way I described above. There are no error messages in the PHP error log at the time this happens.
The OJS version is currently 3.3.0.8, that has gone through several upgrades over the last 10 years.
Has anyone else experienced this? So far, I have found no reports on this.
Hi @heike_riegler
It’s possible that you are unable to log in as the occasional user because that user is not enabled. If you’ve got email validation enabled a new user will stay disabled until they follow the link sent when they create their account. I don’t think you can log in as a user if they are still disabled.
You’d be able to tell by looking for the “Enable User” link below their user account when you search for them. If it says “Disable User” instead, then they are already enabled.
Best
Jason
Hi @jnugent ,
thanks for the suggestion, but I don’t think thats it. We do not have email validation enabled and all users I merged in the last days were enabled. Just now it happened again that I tried to login as a user. When clicking open the menu on the top right corner (the little person icon) it even displays the user name I am trying to log in as, indicating that I am now in the user profile but as soon as I click ‘edit profile’, I am back in my own profile. However, if I try this a second time with the same user profile it works.
Is there somewhere I can look for an error message other than the php error log?
What might also be noteworthy is that most (or all?) of the user profiles this happens with are probably SPAM accounts. The combination of names with email addresses hints to this. Maybe the SPAM bot that created those in a previous OJS version in 2019/2020 somehow managed to do so incompletely?
Kind regards,
Heike