s2member upgrade pages don't recognize logged in user. Works on subdomain though

I’ve read that there are some issues with using www and non-www with s2member, but does this carry over to the subdomain vs live site?

I think that issue concerns having mysite.com as opposed to https://www.mysite.com, so I don’t think it’s relevant to the difference between a subdomain and main domain.

But something similar might be. What have you set in General Settings for WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL)?

Gotcha.

In the WordPress Address and Site Address settings we have www set on the live site, and the subdomain for our staging site does not use www.

Upon further reading, it sounds like it might be a cookie issue. Is that possible?

Thanks for the reply!

Update:

Tried changing the WP Address and Site Address settings on our staging site (the subdomain) to use www, and still no change. The forms work on the subdomain but not on the live site.

Just tested the issue on my local environment, and it seems to work fine, just like the staging site.

Looks like it’s just having trouble with the main site.

Any ideas?

So you have www.mysite.com for both the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) on the live site, is that right?

https://www.mysite.com to be specific, but yes. It’s the same in both the WP Address and the Site Address.

Hmm, have you tried clearing your browser’s cache and/or logging into the site using a different browser or computer?

Yup, I’ve tried clearing the cache and cookies (to rule out a cookie conflict like I mentioned earlier)

And yep, just tested it in Chrome and MS Edge to verify, same issue on both as with Firefox.

Well, this sounds to me like a WordPress (rather than an s2Member or browser) issue then. I don’t know who your host is, but I am wondering if they have some special configuration set up for staging sites that is causing this problem.

Hm…what kind of a configuration error could cause that? Something in their caching?

We’re on Bluehost if that makes a difference.

I contacted my hosting provider, they checked for any differences between the subdomain and the live site. There weren’t any differences. They did run a few checks and made sure all permissions were set correctly etc, no luck though.

Tried importing configuration settings from the broken site and importing to a working local environment, but everything still worked.

I found your s2-server-scanner, and ran it against the broken and working versions. The broken one came back with a checksum error. There was an error log on the broken site, once I deleted it the checksum error went away. I checked the error log, and it’s only got one entry from about 3 weeks ago, nothing related to this issue.

If you could provide any more insight into this I would much appreciate it as the site owner will soon be starting a big marketing push encouraging users to upgrade from free accounts to paid ones, and with this issue they will not be able to upgrade.

Thanks for all your help already!

@jfoster-42,

Just to be clear, s2Member is not my plugin. I’m just a contented user.

What I’d do now is check whether WordPress — not s2Member — knows you are logged in. If it doesn’t, the problem is definitely with your WordPress installation (a corrupted database after the migration, perhaps).

Ah okay! I apologize, I thought you were an s2member employee!

WordPress seems to know I’m logged in, as I can get into the admin area just fine and all my logged in/logged out conditionals work as expected.

Again sorry for the confusion and thank you so much for your assistance ??

No problem — just didn’t want to be taken as speaking for the s2Member devs! Anyway, I’m down to my last idea now!

I used to clone WP installations using the cPanel cloning tool. This worked well until a few months ago, when the cloned installation would not let me set custom registration fields in s2Member. Everything else was fine, but that just wouldn’t work. I’ve tried another couple of times since and got the same result. So now I’ve changed how I clone my WP installs.

Obviously, I haven’t experienced what you are seeing, but I’m wondering if the cloning method has somehow caused a problem with s2Member.

If so, unfortunately, the only solution will be to nuke your current live install and re-create it using a different cloning method. And you won’t know whether that was the problem until you have tried it.

So I’d be inclined first to go back to Bluehost to see if they have any other ideas. (My own host walked me through various other possibilities and when they also proved fruitless, re-creation by a different cloning method was really the only thing left.)

Totally understand ?? Thanks for clearing that up!

Hm…I’ve never used the cPanel clone tool on this site. I always either use WP Migrate Db + manually transfer files, or I use a plugin called Updraft Plus which handles our backups, and it can do migrations as well.

I just took a full clone of the live site and tried it on my local environment. It was a fresh copy so I know everything is exactly the same, and it seems to be working fine.

I also tried adding define ('COOKIE_DOMAIN', '.example.com'); to the wp-config file, since the live one is the only version that has a subdomain. Doesn’t seem to have done anything though.

Bluehost was kinda unwilling to help, since no matter how I ask the questions it sounds like an s2member problem rather than a hosting problem ?? which kinda sucks. How were you able to determine that it was an issue with the cloning method?