Postby rdearman » Thu Nov 12, 2015 12:34 am
As far as I know, cookies are only used to store the session id and to make possible to log in automatically (autologin). phpBB works even if you disable cookies because all (most) links have the "sessionid" parameter. As long as your Session ID or SID is valid in the DB here on the forum, and hasn't been cleared from your browsers cache then you should be ok.
You should only encounter problems if the SID your browser is giving isn't recognised by the forum page, in which case it redirects you to the login page. Or if your browser doesn't have a SID (cookie) to present. Or if you haven't ticked the "autologin" option when you signed in. There could also be problems on the server side. For example when we migrated the domain to the current one, the old SID were invalid because they didn't have the new domain name in them. Or if your SID is expired in the database. Some browsers can be set to automatically clear the cache on exit, or other trigger, so this would clear your SID and cause you to re-login.
Your IP address is recorded as part of the session ID (see below) and therefore a change in IP address could cause the autologin to fail. However all the reseach I have done indicates the programmers don't check for IP changes. This is because you could, for example, on a mobile device change from WiFi to mobile data and get a different IP, but you wouldn't want to be logged out of your session. On this board the "remember me" is allowed, and for an unlimited amount of time.
So the short answer is: I have absolutely no idea why you got logged out. I blame wizards or aliens.
==============
session_id varchar(32) primary key
session_user_id mediumint(8) unsigned tbd 0
session_last_visit int(11) unsigned tbd 0
session_start int(11) unsigned tbd 0
session_time int(11) unsigned tbd 0
session_ip varchar(40) tbd
session_browser varchar(150) tbd
session_page varchar(255) tbd
session_viewonline tinyint(1) unsigned tbd 1
session_autologin tinyint(1) unsigned tbd 0
session_admin tinyint(1) unsigned tbd 0
0 x