Login Problems

I set up this site some time ago, but my friend has asked for help now because of some problems. Here is what I know: the site worked fine for several years, with the only issue being about five months ago needing a CBSubs upgrade. All worked fine until this week. Since I did not perform the Joomla upgrade to 3.65. Latest CB and CBsubs are installed.

The only two changes that seem to have occurred are the Joomla upgrade and the owner deleting the original Free CBsubs plan. Owner says he also probably added some plugins to speed the site up recently, but even if that's the case, the results are really odd...

The results are that users cannot login on the main page. Or, if they can (which we seemed to make happen today - I believe after two tries), they are logged in as the last person to have logged in, not their own profile. No database errors when I run the tools. Plus, users can log in just fine in Kunena forum.

We are redirecting members to the forum, but we want a main page login. I saw something about the two-attempt login issue, but not anything about getting a different username once logged in.

When looking around, I disabled JCH Optimize Pro and jSGCache in order to see if those add-ons were doing it. I wanted to mention that this is the owner's account on joomlapolis and he is the paid member, so I am not trying to get free advice for some other website. Upon disabling these plugins, we're back to not being able to login at all on main page.

I also deleted login redirect from cb login module as it seems he had added a redirect there that you'd advised against in another forum post. Maybe still a cache issue with plugins, but other users might have had experience dealing with this, so I wanted to update the post.

Sounds like a cache problem. Disable all caching (Joomla and 3rd party). Next purge the cache within Joomla. Now visit the frontpage. Next check the cache again. If new cache is there then caching isn't completely disabled and you need to find what's still trying to cache. Sometimes the Joomla template has some form of caching so be sure to try Joomlas default protostar template. Caching is the only way Joomla could be serving a page with the wrong user displayed and is typically page caching specifically doing it (as it caches the entire page buffer).

Login redirects are fine as long as they're configured correctly. They should be non-SEF and begin with index.php. If you include the domain you run the risk of cross-domain issues. For example if you configured it with www and someone logs in on your domain without www they'll redirect and appear not logged in as Joomla cookie is domain strict (as it should be for security purposes). Also ensure live_site within configuration.php is empty as that could also be a source of cross domain issues.