I’m ripping my hair out trying to fix weird login session issues I’m having on multiple Concrete CMS websites I run and I think I’ve had this problem for years without realising it.
Both are Concrete CMS v8.5.x and due to addons they rely upon that are no longer getting updated, they cannot upgrade to v9.x any time soon. So this is my problem and I’m trying to find a solution.
The issue is that after logging in, there are pages that work as if I am logged in, and then there are pages that act as if I am not logged in at all. The pages that act as if I am not logged in “fix” the session issue when the page is refreshed with F5, however, they are not fixed by browsing to another page and back to the same page.
This is also a problem because I don’t want to tell new users to the websites to “just press F5” to fix session issues, as to me that’s a junk answer that kicks the can down the road. Plus there will be people who just leave the site without even telling me they have problems.
I’ve gone through a lot of permutations of troubleshooting to establish a pattern and a possible root-cause, but so far I can’t find much of a reliable pattern, nor an indicator of a root-cause.
I’ve eliminated the reverse-proxy in-front of it by overriding my hosts file to connect to the Concrete CMS websites directly (on LAN).
Clearing cache on the sites (including thumbnails) do not seem to change the results.
I’ve taken a few attempts to switch to session handler “database” but I’m not entirely sure if I did that correctly, and it didn’t seem to change the results.
I’ve of course tried this in multiple different incognito browsers (Firefox, Chromium, etc) and the results do not seem to be tied to a specific browser.
So… I think I need a dev to help me here, or some other keen individual, as at this point I’m not sure what to try next or what to do about it. My google-fu has not turned up useful results.
Does anyone have any ideas as to what this could be? Thanks for anyone chiming in!
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