OJS forgets login

Software Support
1

Hi,

Some users of our OJS-powered journal are reporting that after logging in, they are repeatedly asked to log in each time they navigate to another page in the OJS interface of our journal. OJS seems to forget that a user has been logged in already. Apparently, only when the “remember me” option is selected, the successful login is being remembered.

I’ve checked other forum topics in this area, and applied a possible workaround suggested there (https://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13057&p=50151&hilit=cookie#p50184). I’ve renamed the session_cookie_name setting in the OJS configuration file to something else. Afterwards, it seemed to work for a while, but now this error is being reported again.Strangely, we’ve never had this problem before, and I’m not aware of anything that could have changed.

The problem reported suggests that the session cookie is at stake. Are there known problems with this, and working solutions? Since we don’t control the server ourselves, we’re still running OJS-2.3.1.2. Of course, if cookie-related bugs have been fixed in the meantime, that could be an argument to try and update to a later version.

Best,

Ron

2

Hi @rvdb,

If you see this intermittently (only for some users), I suspect you may need to disable the session_check_ip option in config.inc.php. See this thread for more information.

OJS 2.3.1-2 is pretty old – it was released in 2009 – and I would definitely recommend upgrading in any case.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

Another session-related improvement since 2.3.1-2 is the ability for OJS to negotiate transitions of the cookie across subdomains (for example logging in at www.domain.tld and remaining logged in at domain.tld)

4

Ok, many thanks for your thoughts. The session_check_ip option might be worth a try; but I agree upgrading is the preferred scenario.