Forum Moderators: open
When someone logs in, a random number is assigned as the session id, and this is stored in the site's database along with the IP address of the user. When the user asks for the members-only pages, this is accessed with page.html?username=abc&session=xyz as the URL.
Now, I have received a number of complaints, all from people accessing the site with the AOL browser, saying that they cannot access the members pages. It appears that they fail the authenication process, and get booted out of the site.
I tell them to continue using their AOL connection, but access the site with IE or any other browser, and this works fine.
Interestingly, there are other pages which are accessed with the?variable=abc format, and I gather that the AOL users can still see this OK. (Or it may be that these people simply walk away rather than bother to complain...)
Has anyone else experienced anything similar with the AOL browser / or have any clues as to what the problem is? :-)
AOL Browser versions are just chock full of surprises, but I haven't run into this one yet. Then again, I avoid query strings with more than one variable because our search engine friends seem to have an allergy to those pages.
If you are authenticating on IP, that's your problem.
My site uses a session cookie for the same level of authentification, and that works fine with AOL browers.
Perhaps you could combine both methods to handle the people who don't take cookies
