The "Remember me" checkbox is not working on our wiki. If users terminate and restart their browser, they have to log into the wiki again. This doesn't happen on Wikipedia, so I assume our wiki is having a session problem.

The PHP session directory (session.save_path) exists, is writable by the webserver, and session files ARE being created within it:

session.save_path="C:\temp\php\Session"

(and I have already tried moving the directory underneath the PHP installation directory, but that didn't help).

If I watch the browser's cookies and the session directory, the browser switches to a new session without preserving the username information. A detailed case study is below.

Setup is: MediaWiki 1.9.3 on Windows 2003 server; Apache 2.2.4; PHP 5.2.1; mySQL 5.

Case study:

1. I visit our MediaWiki site and log in, taking care to check the checkbox, "Remember my login on this computer". Note: Our wiki requires logins to edit a page:

# LocalSettings.php: $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

Authentication is done using normal MediaWiki accounts.

2. Confirm that a PHP session file was created, its name is stored in a browser cookie (wikidb_tablePrefix__session), and it contains this information:

kw_bread_crumbs: TechWiki (1.9.3.vp.2.e)|a:2:{i:0;s:17:"Special:Userlogin";i:1;s:16:"Name of page";}wsUserID|i:16;wsUserName|s:4:"Danb";wsToken|s:32:"f12a2d7154f0ea29190a5c0fb91a6e1a";

3. Close the browser. Confirm the session file still exists as above.

4. Launch the browser and visit the wiki's home page. The correct username is displayed at the top of the page, as if the user were still logged in. Everything looks good so far, but........

5. Visit ANY OTHER page on the wiki. The username at the top of the page disappears, the IP address is shown instead, and a new session file gets associated with the browser (as verified in the session cookie above). The new session file contains no username information:

kw_bread_crumbs: TechWiki (1.9.3.vp.2.e)|a:1:{i:0;s:36:"Name of page";}

and the old session file still exists, unchanged.

Now, if I repeat this experiment but use en.wikipedia.org instead of my wiki, the session information is remembered even after I close and reopen the browser.

This problem exists in both IE 7 and Firefox 2.0. And the problem existed before we installed the "kw_bread_crumbs" extension mentioned in the session data above.

Any help appreciated!

- Dan Barrett dbarrett@vistaprint.com