Annette, I know it's frustrating and I really know just how frustrating cookies can be after I had a lot of fun with users losing their login because a proxy in between switched the casing of the path's value and the browser stopped sending the cookies and then needing to come up with the correct fix for this.
Anyhow, the longer path values are back for me in Firefox so as far as I'm concerned, I don't think disabling the SEO/spider-friendly URLs did us much good in the long run. Plus, it broke the TOCs, so may just going back to the original setting
Hmm...I don't remember, did you disable them while trying to troubleshoot this or was that an effect of the server reboot, too?
I can see that the admin settings look right/sensible/what they should be set to. But since there's still a path value being sent, I'm thinking this might be cause there's another place in the software or on the server where the cookie path is set. Maybe there's a proxy or are there customizations of the pages done? The reason I was curious about the server reboot was that it appeared to trigger the problems and there could be changes that have been made since the previous reboot and they only now became active. Do you know when the last reboot was or if there was a change that never had an effect and just slipped through the cracks till this week?
While googling this I managed to find this post here:
http://community.mybb.com/thread-134372.html and
http://community.mybb.com/thread-126359.html I know that it's mybb and not ubb but maybe since they're both "bb"-boards and use php, there might be similarities in regards to the config-options? They definitely mention that the settings can be done in code and in the database via the UI and if not done correctly, a server restart resets them etc.
The 6 users: I know, that just a couple of us. But it seems like it's also at least half of the users who posted since the trouble started. I really don't envy you and am just trying to offer all the ideas I can think of to remotely troubleshoot this. Sadly, I don't have any experience with the UBB stuff or, well, any recent php experience, so I can't go beyond generic ideas. That's also why I mentioned zoomway's. Most defaults on web servers etc are to send empty path values because paths in cookies are just trouble. And since zoomway's isn't sending a path either and uses the same software, it seemed to me that we're not doing the default but rather something has been configured somewhere to cause this behavior. And since it's not in the very obvious admin gui, it's got to be somewhere else, be it the php-files, Apache itself or a reverse proxy server, etc. And that means needle in a haystack
Did I mention that I do get why you're frustrated?
Michael
