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I have a Joomla! version 3.4.1 site that we just launched. We have a very strange issue where user credentials work or don't work consistently from certain workstations within certain browsers. One user can log in Using Safari on Mac but Chrome fails. My login works in Firefox but not Safari on Mac, but not Firefox on my one Ubuntu rig, does work in Firefox on my other Ubuntu rig. I set up a test user and tried another set of credentials (3 total) and they all work or fail consistently, depending on computer and browser.

I've never seen anything this weird in 30 years of coding and working on computers in general.

Any ideas of what to check or look at would be helpful!

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  • Do the basic analysis by creating a table of browsers and platforms and build the grid of what works. You should see some common thing among them. I believe this is something about cookies being disabled or the browsers cannot access cache area on your disk etc.
    – Nagarjun
    Commented May 19, 2015 at 2:48
  • Hey, can you login into other account? Do you have any kind of errors?
    – Lanah
    Commented May 19, 2015 at 7:37
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    Do you have any plugins installed that could interfere? If so, try and disable them all and see if that solves it, if it does, try and enable them one by one to find the culprit.
    – Epodax
    Commented May 19, 2015 at 10:09

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Reset the router. The login works fine for me after I do this. I have no idea why this works, but it does.

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Jooomla Cache

Try clearing the Joomla cache.

Local Browser Cache

Try clearing the web browser cache.

Redirection Consistency

I have seen similar behaviour when the website is not being redirected consistently.

In Joomla 3.x, you probably shouldn't be using the livesite parameter in the configuration.php file but if you are, make sure it's consistent with any redirections in your .htaccess file or anywhere else. For example, if you are redirecting the non-www version of the website to the www version of the website, make sure the livesite parameter (if you are using it) is set to the www version of the website.

.htaccess

Back up your .htaccess file and temporarily copy the contents of htaccess.txt to .htaccess to reset your .htaccess file back to defaults to see if something in .htaccess is causing the issue.

Joomla Update and Check for Malware

You should also upgrade to the latest version of Joomla as Joomla 3.4.1 has some known vulnerabilities. I'd be inclined to scan the website using mysites.guru (formerly myjoomla.com) or similar in case the website has been compromised and this is the reason you are having intermittent login issues.

Third Party Extensions

What third party extensions are enabled on the website? Try temporarily disabling these one by one to check if a third party extension is responsible. Try updating all third party extensions to the latest versions as this may also help fix the issue.

Session Table

The [prefix]_session table is frequently updated in Joomla and can occasionally become corrupt. Run a repair on the table using phpMyAdmin or Akeeba Admin Tools or similar.

Front-end / Back-end

Are the back-end and front-end logins both affected or only one of these? This information may help narrow down the issue.

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