We are seeing an issue we have not totally figured out yet. What's happening is that randomly users are getting logged out when they do not want to log out. They are mostly using IE7. We did find some errors in IE where if you have multiple tabs and you close one it can delete the cookies of other tabs as it closes. Microsoft has known about this error for about a year and never put in a fix for it. I do not think this is the cause though.

We have seen that it happens most often to our members who are Chinese. They are running Windows OS Chinese versions. They have set US English as their language on their system.

What's happening to them is that about 1 out of every 25 to 50 pages they load in the forums they get logged out. It happens at what seems to be random places. They can be just viewing or even posting. When it happens during a post they sometimes show up as Anonymous. We do not allow anonymous posters. So this appears to be a bug.

We have been trying to gather more information for several weeks. This is the best I have been able to come up with. I have not been able to personally replicate it as I do not have Windows Chinese version OS.

Has anyone else encountered this? Knowing my luck I'm the only UBB that gets a lot of Chinese members.

I think it's a matter of how many cookies are being set on your site. In IE. the limit used to be 20 cookies per domain, before it would start deleting the oldest set cookie. There was a cumulative security patch released a while back that raised that number to 50.

I went to a total of 4 pages on your forums, and ended up with 32 cookies being set. The vast majority had the name of split[#], where the # was a different number for each one.

What happens is once the cookie limit is reached, it deletes the oldest cookie. The oldest cookies have the info that keeps a user logged in, so once that's deleted they are logged out.

What you might need to do is create a subdomain, and whatever is setting that split(#) cookie, could be run under the subdomain so it doesn't interfere with the UBB cookies.

Excellent clue. I'll make some changes and we will see what happens.

I was able to verify that our issues started at about the same time we added split testing of some content to our forums. We are changing those cookies to sessions.

For a quick fix before my programmers make the changes to our other application I was thinking of changing the forums to use sessions. But I didn't see an option for it. Was there not an option for this? I could swear that I have seen it in the past.

There used to be an option to track via sessions, but it had some issues, so didn't make it into the 7.0 rewrite.