Responses from AT&T About Login Issue?

[goodkel]

My member placed a call to AT&T customer service and pretty much quoted the response from here to them:

"This is a known issue for some AT&T customers in
certain parts of the country. From past occurrences, it'll happen for a
couple of weeks and then start working again. Unfortunately there's
nothing we can do on our end to prevent this, since it something
specific to AT&T that doesn't affect any other internet providers.
Our internal tests have shown that AT&T is attempting to inject
their own cookie along with the cookie we try to set to save your login
session. Because of this, our cookie ends up becoming invalid and you
are not able to stay logged into your account."

They told her that since she has no problem with any other site, this must be Proboards' issue to solve.

Has anyone else received a more helpful response? If, like the Firefox problem, this can be solved by just removing a certain code, I would love to know about it.

The member I have who is having this problem is an attorney who assists members of my board pro bono with health insurance appeals . Because they often work with a tight deadline this is more than just an inconvenience for them.

Much thanks to anyone who can help!

[Craig]

Hi,

A member of the ProBoards team will respond a little later today. Please check back for a response

Craig

[SLRdude]

I am having the same exact issue and I cannot log it from any of my wireless devices.

Interestingly enough, it does it when on WiFi as well.

[CheatAreZee]

Jan 21, 2013 22:22:53 GMT -8 goodkel said:

My member placed a call to AT&T customer service and pretty much quoted the response from here to them:

"This is a known issue for some AT&T customers in
certain parts of the country. From past occurrences, it'll happen for a
couple of weeks and then start working again. Unfortunately there's
nothing we can do on our end to prevent this, since it something
specific to AT&T that doesn't affect any other internet providers.
Our internal tests have shown that AT&T is attempting to inject
their own cookie along with the cookie we try to set to save your login
session. Because of this, our cookie ends up becoming invalid and you
are not able to stay logged into your account."

They told her that since she has no problem with any other site, this must be Proboards' issue to solve.

Has anyone else received a more helpful response? If, like the Firefox problem, this can be solved by just removing a certain code, I would love to know about it.

The member I have who is having this problem is an attorney who assists members of my board pro bono with health insurance appeals . Because they often work with a tight deadline this is more than just an inconvenience for them.

Much thanks to anyone who can help!

Very few, if any, other members that experienced this issue with AT&T has gotten back to us about the response they got from AT&T when contacting them about the issue. Unfortunately though, this is something that happens only for AT&T customers, and only in certain areas (as was already noted to you by the looks of it). Every other internet service provider in the world, and even most of AT&T's customers have no issues with logging into the forums we host (the AT&T data connections we have available here at the office work fine, for example).

I'm afraid the solution isn't as simple as removing a code, since it has to do with the cookie that AT&T is attempting to set. My only suggestion at this point would be to contact them again, and try to get in touch with a higher level tech support who know the fundamentals of their network, which likely won't be the first person they are able to reach when dialing their support line.  

[mwardncsu]

Looking in on this issue..... experiencing this in the Central NC (Raleigh, Burlington, Greensboro) area as well as Southwest VA on iPhone with iOS 6 using the Safari browser. This was a problem for a while, then went away, but has been back now for the last several weeks.

WiFi via AT&T works fine - Cellular data access is a no-go to log-in to any ProBoards forum. Very problematic for many of our forums users.

Using the ProBoards app, I can log-in, but after restarting the app I have to log-in again - not sure if this is related.

Can the ProBoards folks please provide some specifics that we can use to approach AT&T - and what is being done on the ProBoards end to resolve - either internally or working with AT&T?

[CheatAreZee]

For those that have issues logging in and are using an AT&T connection, I spoke with our system admins to let them know about the rise of complaints we've received from AT&T customers in the last week and they have agreed to investigate this issue once again to see if there's anything we can do on our end to correct it.

Please note: Only do the steps below if you are an AT&T customer and are not able to login after typing in your username and password on a forum (no error messages). If you are experiencing login issues and are not an AT&T customer, or get an error message when logging in, please create a new thread.

This is the info they've requested for now:

- Visit the forum and attempt to login using your username and password. Once that's done, note the time that's displayed on your computer.

- Then visit www.whatismyIP.com to find out your IP address.

- Assuming you still were unable to stay logged into the forum this time, send me a PM letting me know the URL of the forum, the time you tried to log into the forum (along with your local time zone), as well as what your IP address is.

I'll then forward that info on to our system admins to look into it further

[tt54l32v]

forum.thehoundztooth.com/index.cgi?
12:40 central time, I'm in Alabama

[CheatAreZee]

Jan 23, 2013 10:42:24 GMT -8 tt54l32v said:

forum.thehoundztooth.com/index.cgi?
12:40 central time, I'm in Alabama

Thanks tt54l32v, I've added it to the list. (I removed your IP from the post as well)

[tinkb]

No one in DC, MD or VA using AT&T has been able to log in unless on wifi. AT&T tech said if it's proboards and no other board then it is something proboards should look at. Question is why not a proboards adjustment to whatever the rest of the industry is doing?
Time displayed: 11:50am
Time zone: eastern standard
URL: nextsportsphenom.boards.net
IP Address: 

[bubbab]

I was having the same problem with all 3 browsers on my laptop, IE, Chrome and Firefox.  I connect through AT&T wireless LTE.  I managed to fix my problem by disabling the AVG Security toolbar extension, once that was disabled I was able to access the forum again.

[CheatAreZee]

Jan 24, 2013 9:01:31 GMT -8 tinkb said:

No one in DC, MD or VA using AT&T has been able to log in unless on wifi. AT&T tech said if it's proboards and no other board then it is something proboards should look at. Question is why not a proboards adjustment to whatever the rest of the industry is doing?
Time displayed: 11:50am
Time zone: eastern standard
URL: nextsportsphenom.boards.net
IP Address: 

This would be why I requested the above info so our system admins can have another look. But just to be clear, the same thing can be said for AT&T as well: every other internet provider in the world works just fine. The only internet provider that experiences this issue is AT&T, and it's not even across their whole network, just in certain areas. So a reverse question could also be asked: why not an AT&T adjustment to whatever the rest of the ISP industry, as well as most of AT&T's own network itself, is doing? 

With that noted though, I've forwarded the info you provided on to our system admins as well. Thanks  

[tinkb]

Upgrade to new board and problem appears to have disappeared. Thanks at&t or proboards

[Bjn]

AT&T is not injecting any cookies. Even if they were, that shouldn't be an issue. Your software should ignore any cookies that it isn't expecting.

The issue is with the cookie header, however. Most browsers send the header in the following format:

Cookie: cookie1=value1; cookie2=value2

AT&T's proxies are sending the header in the following format:

Cookie: cookie1=value1;cookie2=value2

That is, it is eliminating the space character between cookies. Either format is acceptable according to the specs. Every other web server that I've seen correctly parses the cookie header when it's sent in either format. It's either a problem with the proboard's web server or the proboards software itself.

I can provide more details if necessary

[VS Admin]

Bjn,

Can you tell me what forum you use when trying to login with the mobile app? We're going to try some changes based on your information, and we need to know whether to make these changes in the v5 code or v4.5.

Thanks for your help

[Bjn]

emergencybackupboard.proboards.com/