Geeklog Forums

Hello,

I've been using GL on several sites for about 6 years. I have written a number of customizations and plugins that have worked nicely. I've poked around and tried to learn everything I could about how GL runs. I'm running a number of membership-based club sites, most using Geeklog, and have been dogged by the same basic collection of problems.

1) Many of my users are very novice level people, and have only basic knowledge of how to run a browser to get places.
2) I'm *constantly* dealing with a not-trivial number of members that can't seem to log in, lots of them are AOL customers, or using some ISP tweaked browser.
3) The symptoms are always the same: They enter the username/pass, the site saves their sessionID properly, says they're online, but they still aren't "logged in".

So, seems that their browser is either not accepting the cookie, or maybe requires some privacy policy, or they're using a proxy server or whatever.
I can almost always walk them through changing browser settings, or have them access the site via IE, Firefox, etc.

But the bottom line comment that almost always gets made here is that they use this browser as-is to log into banks, other membership sites, ebay and all kinds of other online stuff just fine, so why is it that they have to change settings for my site?

I'd love to continue with GL, but I'm growing weary of this, and know people using "other" platforms instead of GL, that simply don't have any of these member login issues.
I've read everything on this site (that I could find, given how poorly the forum search works) regarding this problem, double checked my cookie settings ie.. cookiedomain, cookie _session, cookie_name, cookie_password, not using securecookie, or cookie_ip, etc. But all experiments seem to generally leave me in the same situation.

Is there any good way to have GL detect and report to a visiting user that they don't have their browser set up properly to log into a GL site?

Sorry this is so long, but for YEARS, I've been reading about people having trouble logging into GL sites and it all seems so bizarre that it is still seems like such a problem.
One such site close to 20% of my users couldn't log in.

This site probably doesn't get the novice level of users I get, so the issue probably isn't noticed here.

-Jeff