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bigH2O
01-07-2007, 12:34 AM
Got a situation on another board that is making me scratch my head.

This is a new site (3 mos old) started up by two people who are not strangers to the internet, but not the most well versed when it comes to administering a vbull board.

I was in the who's online page tonight and notice a "guest" in the "admin control panel". Woops. So I contact the Super Modererator, who also has Administrator as an additional user group, and she explains that this is an ongoing problem.

She is trying really hard to help out people who are coming to the site, and when people have trouble registering, she happily logs herself out, goes in as guest, creates a user account for them, then emails them the credentials.

So I investigated it a little deeper, and it turns out that this guest who was in the admin cp had the same IP as the super moderator, who was also listed as being online, but viewing a thread. I questioned her. She is clearing her cookies and isn't accidently staying logged in on another machine.

She explained to me that there has been as many as 23 users... 1 member and 22 guests... all with the same IP (not hers) on the board at the same time. She says these multiple identities... 1 member, multiple guests, same IP... happen with regular occurrences. It is only getting disturbing now that the "guests" are showing up under IPs of people with access to the admin cp.

To my knowledge this is mostly a straight out of the box vbull 3.6.2 install with nothing but PhotoPost added to it. Yeah, I know I need to talk them into vbpicgallery, but they had just got it going good when I joined, and were so proud to get PhotoPost up I didn't want to bust their bubble just yet. I had already suggested to the admin a couple of weeks ago that he upgrade to 3.6.4, but he never did anything about it.

Does this problem ring a bell with anybody? My head's getting sore and bald from scratching it so much.

Zero Tolerance
01-07-2007, 10:18 AM
I cant comment on vB...but this happens with phpNuke driven sites as well. Im not sure the cause and havent taken the time to investigate it because I know its not someone proxying the IP based soely on the fact that I can replicate it on a test system isolated to my LAN and private class C IP subnets.

My best guess is that even though the cookies are cleared on the local machine....the session ID is still being held on the server to a guest. Thus the results you and I both are seeing.

bigH2O
01-07-2007, 10:45 AM
Thanks for the input zero. If anybody else has any input I would sure appreciate it.

Big Dan
01-07-2007, 02:29 PM
Strange is all I have to say the IP problem is way out my realm of expertise. My best guess would be the session ID is getting changed somehow thus causing multiple sessions for the same IP.

As for the registration problems, the Admin can add people right from the ACP: ACP > Users > Add New

That's all I know, sorry I couldn't be of more help. :)

Edit: Maybe an upgrade to 3.6.4 would help some?

Greg
01-07-2007, 03:24 PM
Link?

The Iraqi
03-02-2008, 03:59 PM
I haven't had this kind of problem, but I had one or 2 cases of Guests attempting registration with their IPS shown on the whoisonline as xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx but when the completed the registration, the ip was "blank" i.e vb did not register their ips.

I had to manually write their IP in their user profile.

I must say that I have a hack which shows the proxy if one is being used.