I’ve been having a recurring issue lately where I get logged out of the forum multiple times a night—more than twice, actually. This never happened before and just started this week.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my browser. Could this be related to the recent forum software upgrade?
I’m not deleting my cookies, and even when I accidentally did in the past, I would stay logged in. I haven’t clicked “Log Out” either.
Any ideas?
Topic Summary: User seeks cause of random logouts after forum upgrade; replies suggest cookie settings, session timeout, IP changes, and server session path permissions.
Topic Overview (Wikipedia):
An HTTP cookie is a small block of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user’s computer or other device by the user’s web browser. Cookies are placed on the device used to access a website, and more than one cookie may be placed on a user’s device during a session.
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This is a common issue that can happen after a forum upgrade. The session management might have changed.
First, check if your browser is set to clear cookies on exit. In Chrome, go to Settings > Privacy and Security > Cookies and Other Site Data, and make sure “Clear cookies and site data when you close all windows” is off.
Also, try adding the forum URL to your browser’s exceptions list so cookies aren’t deleted. Another thing: some security plugins or ad blockers can interfere with session cookies.
Try disabling them temporarily to see if that helps.
Yeah, that happens to me sometimes too. Also, I really dislike that “inactive for 15 minutes” message that pops up.
Maybe the upgrade changed the session timeout settings? I heard that some forums reduce the timeout to save server resources.
You could check if there’s a “Remember Me” checkbox when you log in—that sometimes keeps you logged in longer. Also, try using a different browser to see if the issue persists.
That’ll help narrow down if it’s a browser-specific problem.
Let’s look at this systematically. The forum upgrade likely changed how sessions are handled.
IPB (now IPS Community Suite) uses PHP sessions with a cookie-based identifier. If the session lifetime is set too low in the server configuration, you’ll get logged out quickly.
Also, if your IP address changes frequently (e.g., mobile data or VPN), the session can become invalid. Check your browser’s developer tools (F12) under Application > Cookies to see the session cookie’s expiration time.
If it’s very short, that’s the culprit. You can also try clearing your browser cache and cookies for this site specifically, then logging in again with “Remember Me” checked.
I had this exact issue after the last upgrade, and it drove me crazy. What finally fixed it for me was checking the session save path on the server—turns out the upgrade changed the tmp directory permissions, so sessions were getting dumped randomly. If you have access to phpinfo, look for session.save_path and make sure it’s writable. Also, check if your forum uses Redis or Memcached for sessions; sometimes the upgrade switches to file-based sessions and the old cache keys linger. Anyone else notice if it happens more after you visit certain pages?
