Persistent website login

[Scouse]

So there's another forum I frequent where whoever admins regularly makes a hash of everything.

My pet beef is that I get logged out every 14 days. Sometimes much more often. He says that session cookies are set to 14 day expiration and if he didn't set it to that then subscribed members would still be able to see pay-for content when their subs ran out and that "the whole internet works like this".

Which, of course, is bunkum, as I've been logged in here forever and loads of other websites.

Not being a web designer or architect - how *should* he be configuring his shit

 

[MYstIC G]

His kingdom, his rules. Sounds like the forum software is the problem if that work around is required.

 

[Scouse]

yes of course, but how is it normally done?

I think he just doesn't know.

 

[Syri]

I can't say if this is definitely how others would do it, and I haven't done much back-end website work for some time, but I'd expect them to put an entry in the "Users" database that stores the date they've paid up to. When they visit a page, it will then check the date compared to the date paid up to, and if that date has passed, block them from seeing paid only content.
What it sounds like they're doing is setting a cookie session that flags them as a paid member, then just checking for whether or not there is a "paid" cookie, rather than storing in the database and referring back to that. This is the only way I can think of that you would "need" to clear cookies regularly to maintain access to paid content. My best guess is that they've rigged a paid membership system into some existing forum software, but they don't know enough, or have the confidence, to add extra fields to the "Users" table so have used a very crude workaround instead.

 

[Scouse]

Yep. Likely that...

Merci

 

[Jupitus]

Yep. Likely that...

Merci

If it was up to me, FH would log you out every 30 seconds