Member can't log in

Neither I or the member can log in using valid credentials

Hi All,

An important and regular user wrote to me a few days ago saying they couldn't log in and was unable to reset their password (possibly due to an email address change).

I've edited their account as an administrator and reset the password to one they requested and updated their email address.

They have written back to say they still can't log in so I've checked to see if I'd made a mistake and tried to log in using their credentials but I am also unable to log in.

I have masqueraded as this user and everything works fine. I have changed their password again and again but still can't directly log into their account. The site simply returns "Login Error"

I have considered creating a new account for them and merging the two accounts but I'm concerned that I may dig a bigger hole for myself  if I follow this course without finding the cause of the problem.

I have made no version changes to the site/php/SQL in recent times. I am running site version 10.0.43.

Can anyone suggest how I should proceed?

TQ

Hi,

The following tutorial may be of assistance for changing the password via the database:- Composr Tutorial: Disaster recovery - Composr which will hopefully work for you. Had to do it myself a while ago. Good luck. Awesome site by the way, like what you've done there.

Hi Adem,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

I don't use PHPMyAdmin and I couldn't quickly work out how to encrypt the password with HeidiSQL but I have managed to resolve the problem by changing the members email address to one on my mail server then running the lost password process.

The only question remains is why I couldn't change the users password using the admin profile directly on the users account. Is this an issue or is it just a freak one-time problem.

Kind regards

TQ

PS: Thanks for the comment on the site, I couldn't have done it without Composr

TQ Out of curiosity, if you look in HeidiSQL at the member database, what is the m_password_compat_scheme for that member? Perhaps something was set in there which would have made Composr password not work correctly.

Sorry you didn't get a fast reply. The slowness is explained by Update on Composr, myself, and the future - Composr

I wonder if it was some kind of copy and paste problem. Particularly with Unicode, there can be invisible characters (Zero-width space - Wikipedia), or weird multi-character-characters (Combining character - Wikipedia) and other problems (Unicode equivalence - Wikipedia), and what you see is not necessarily what is actually there.

@Patrick: Sorry for the delay in responding but I couldn't for the life of me remember the members username which has just come to me.

The m_password_compat_scheme is empty.

Chris : I did read your message as soon as I received the patreon notification. I wish you the greatest of luck and success in your new job. I really appreciate your tireless efforts and rapid response over the past 10 years or so to keep my site running when it had got the better of me.

As to the possibility of a copy/paste issue. I tried numerous times to edit the members password by hand within their profile to no avail so it's unlikely I repeated any mistake over and over.

Since then I've had a complete meltdown of the cms_post_tokens table which, fortunately, was resolved using the repair option so I'm wondering if there was a database issue at work as there were also a few tables with unclosed connections.

Thanks everyone for responding.

Nick
 

Thanks Nick. That's all pretty weird. I couldn't think of any other causes after tracing the code and nobody has reported similar issues. So yeah, database corruption at the MySQL data file level does seem a strong possibility.

I'm inclined to agree as it's the first and only time it's happened.

Thanks for checking.

Nick