Alternate Session Method activates itself

  • Hi Roland,
    need your help, please.

    The option “Use Alternate Session Method” in the advanced settings always activates itself when this plugins are in use:
    WPForms or WP Mail SMTP or Borlabs Cookie or BackWPup

    That’s causing problems, which make the website not show in many cases:
    – session_start(): Cannot start session when headers already sent
    – Cannot modify header information – headers already sent

    This is what the debugging log says, and also this:
    PDb_Session::get_alt_session_id obtaining session id by alternate method:

    The weird thing is, that I have two installations of the website, one on my staging server, everything running fine, and one on my customers server, where I have this problems. Both installations are identical.

    WP is the last version, I tried with PHP 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, but I can’t solve the problem.

    Do you have any idea? Many thanks.

    Kind regards
    Chris

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author xnau webdesign

    (@xnau)

    The plugin will enable alternate session method when it finds that php sessions are not working.

    This is curious, because when “Use Alternate Session Method” is active, the plugin does not attempt to start a php session. “Headers already sent” can happen for a number of reasons, one of them being running the site with php configured to print messages to the screen.

    The basic reason for the issue is usually that php sessions are not working. This is sometimes because of the server configuration, not directly related to php version, since all versions of php have sessions, it’s a basic feature of the language.

    If you do something to fix php sessions, you should uncheck the user alternate session setting.

    Two of the plugins you mention are plugins I have running on my development machine, so the issue is probably not due to compatibility with those plugins.

    Thread Starter chriswww

    (@chriswww)

    Many thanks for your reply, Roland! It’s really strange.

    On customers server it’s like this:
    – “Use Alternate Session Method”: checked automatically, noch chance to uncheck
    – Cookie “pdb-sess” can be seen in Chrome DevTools on all pages of the website

    On staging server:
    – “Use Alternate Session Method”: unchecked
    – No Cookie “pdb-sess” can be seen, also not on PD pages

    Additional info: I’m using PD with addons PD Combo Search and PD Pretty Permalinks.

    Also had a look at session related server configuration with PHPInfo and the main info section shows this differences:
    “session.gc_probability” on live server: 0
    “session.gc_probability” on staging server: 1
    “session.cookie_httponly” on live server: no value
    “session.cookie_httponly” on staging server: 0

    Can you help?

    Plugin Author xnau webdesign

    (@xnau)

    This is something you’re going to have to take up with your hosting provider…this is way over my head and I can’t advise you on how to configure your server.

    The basic problem is that sessions are not working on your production server, your hosting provider should be able to either get it working or provide instructions for how to configure the plugin so that it can use sessions.

    Thread Starter chriswww

    (@chriswww)

    Okay, I will check this with the provider.

    Thank you very much for your support, Roland!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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