Fickle Cookies

[Stevil]

Hey all 🙂

I'm doing a job for someone (repairing a couple of broken sites) and they claim to be having troubles with cookies. THe cookie code seems ok to me and the cookie length is set to 1000 years (bit optimistic if they think the site will be around in 1000 years little though keeping a user that long). I tested it for a few hours an it seems to be working fine BUT on other peoples computers it can die in a matter of mins, some times doesn't last even that long an on the odd occasion will last a few hours.

They are not deleting their cookies, the cookies are being set, I even had them turn their cookie secuirty off andthe problem still pops its head up on random machines.

I'm not sure what could be causing this, my thoughts are it would have to be a problem on the client machine an not part of the code itself or the server setup as all is well for some machines.

If anyone has had this problem before or anyone else has an idea of what this could be caused by it would be muchly appriecated if you could please share your wisdom.

Stevil

[drew010]

I would try setting the expire to something much sooner than 1000 years.
My guess as to the problem is this: a unix timestamp is a 32 bit long value, therefore as far as a timestamp goes, the highest possible date before overflow is July 8, 2038. 1000 years is far past that date, so perhaps if PHP takes the date and converts it to a timestamp at some point, the value may be overflowing and is getting ignored. Try setting the expire to something like 606024*365. its one year and plenty long to hold the cookie. chances are a users browser or AV program or routine HD cleanup will delete it anyway.
See if that works.