"Steve Bennett" wrote:
On 9/11/06, Nick Jenkins wrote:
Save a backup copy of the cookie file/details, jump onto IRC and do a /join
Can you explain what you mean by "cookie file/details"?
Steve
Cookies of the wiki site you currently have. You can use an extension like WebDeveloper to show them.
In Firefox, you can get to the Firefox Cookie Manager by going Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Cookies -> View Cookies -> search on "en.wikipedia.org" -> gives a list of 4 "enwiki" cookie details, namely "Token" (a string like "190a876023442342327c4c63fac6234"), my "UserID" (a integer like 83912), my session id (generated by PHP, a string like "ce679422680757a63b324238cae08fcc"), and a UserName ("Nickj" in my case). (And just to be clear, I have modified those token / UserId / session values from their actual real values to prevent session hijacking).
Alternatively, you can look at the raw cookie file - it's just a text file : * In Internet Explorer, cookies are stored on a single file-per-cookie basis, and the path would be something like this: "%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings%username%\Cookies%username%@en.wikipedia[1].txt" * In Firefox, it looks like they're all stored in one file, whose path is probably something like this on a Windows system: "%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings%username%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles%MOZ-PROFILE-NAME%\cookies.txt"
Essentially cookies are a form of persistent client-side storage for letting the server store simple state and having the client communicate that state back to the server in subsequent requests; in less jargony terms, it's what allows you open a browser, to log into the Wikipedia, close the browser, reopen the browser, go to the Wikipedia again, and still be logged in: it's remembering who you are. And that's why when it goes wrong, and people end up being treated as users that they're not, then getting the cookie details is the first port of call to see what's going wrong. It could also be good to have a look at the server-side cookie details (e.g. cookies can be stored on the server side in a database, on disk, etc.) for any open sessions for the user they've become, and for the user they're supposed to be. Where to go from there is less clear ;-) but that's probably where to start.
All the best, Nick.