A couple of AOL users have written emails letting me know they cannot make a post or reply. Apparently, they can log in and view messages, but after making a post, the Log-In screen reappears and the message is not posted.
The people who write the PHP bulletin board scripts acknowledge the issue and offer only one fix. However, that fix then exposes the Forums to hijackers and hackers. Canaca wrote back to me, telling me if I made the change, they could no longer be responsible for keeping the site up and running.
So, with all that said, I at least now know there is a problem out of my control The only suggestion I have (not a good one) is to try logging in using a non-AOL system. The problem is caused by AOL assigning random IP addresses.
Here's the info from the php FAQ:
Mike JacksonAOL based users keep getting logged out!
phpBB2 uses sessions to keep track of users as they browse the board. These sessions use a combination of a unique session id and the users IP to identify each user. We make use of the IP as an extra safe-guard to help prevent sessions being hijacked (by discovering the unique session id).
Unfortunately this only works when the users IP is constant as they browse the board. For most users this will be the case. However certain providers route their users via a cluster of proxys. In some cases, particularly AOL this results in different IPs being forwarded as the user moves between pages. We take account of this by not checking the entire IP but only the first "three quads". Again in most cases this will be fine. However again AOL uses IPs which can vary so much that checking only the first two quads results in a fairly static IP being available for session validation.
If you are experiencing problems related to this you can make a small change to the code. Please note that reducing the IP validation length does potentially increase the risk of sessions being hijacked (this is something for you to consider, phpBB Group takes no responsibility should anything happen!).
Denver Chapter of the Letterheads