Hi all. I just sent in this message to support and thought I would also post it here. Anyone have any clues? If yo uneed more info, let me know. Thanks! -BEGIN- After months and months of trouble free operation, my aMember program is behaving in a way that has shaken my confidence in it. What's happening is members with active downloads are being DENIED access on some recently added products. They are using the same usernames and passwords as they always have. I am setting up password protection has I always have. I have checked and double check for an error on my part but can not find any. Some members are able to access the same product while others are not. I added free subscriptions to those having trouble and they ARE ABLE to access the newly added subscription but still not the ones they paid for. It makes no sense and follows no logic to me. Please advise. Again, this is not an issue of an error in setting up password protected folders (I use htpasswd) as some members can access, others can not. And these are members that have made dozens of purchases in the past using the same user and password, so they are experienced buyers. Any idea why this is happening? -END-
Here is an update as I continue trying to figure this out. If I DELETE the product the member could not access from his subscriptions then ADD it back now he can access it. Hopefully this is a clue as to what is going on here.
It's 2:15 AM local time so my mind is not fresh, but I'd try fixing the MySQL tables. aMember, by default, stores everything in MyISAM tables which may need maintenance once in a while. It does not mean the database is necessarily corrupted, just that it needs maintenance. It can be done from phpMyAdmin, for example. Anyway, this may or may not solve the problem but I'd try it as it doesn't really hurt. Tomas P.S. Better ideas when I wake up tomorrow
phpMyAdmin...unchartered waters for me. I'm scared! I'll sit tight for now and then poke around a little. Is there a function to perform maintenence? Thanks - now get some sleep
aMember itself does not have any database maintenance features I believe. Your webhost could be able to do the maintenance for you. It's a simple task, with phpMyAdmin it doesn't take longer than a minute or two most of the time. Tomas
Thank you Tomas. This problem seemed to be short lived, buyers are now getting access to their products. I'd like to know why this may have happened, just so I can understand. Speaking of maintenence, how does one maintain a database? What needs to be maintained? I visited my webhost's panel and did not really see anything about maintainence. I guess I could ask them. I did contact aMember for support, but answers have so far been vague and very brief. They suggested Rebuild DB and creating a Cron Job. Ha ha! I had not even heard of a Cron Job before yesterday, so that gives you an idea of my level of experience. Create a Cron Job? To do what? I found the aMember page with a command, but don't see how it relates to my problem. Still waiting on a reply from them... Thank you for taking the time to answer.
According to Wikipedia, "cron is a time-based scheduling service in Unix-like computer operating systems. 'cron' is short for 'chronograph". It's simply a system that allows you run tasks (just about anything) automatically at specified intervals so that you do not have to run that task manually. The aMember support probably meant that you can create such a cron job to run the maintenance automatically every week, month etc. The database rebuild function in the aMember admin panel could fix the problem, although I am not sure what everything it does - i.e. if it does the table optimization too, beside of the table rebuilding. This feature is useful if, for example, you have some plugins that need to synchronize userbase etc. As for the DB table maintenance / fixing / optimization, this can be usually done from some kind of MySQL database administration application. The most commonly used one is the phpMyAdmin I mentioned, it's usually installed by default on webhosting servers and for example if your webhost is using the cPanel control panel software, it can be found in the "Databases" section of the main admin panel screen. But if you haven't done this before, I suggest you ask someone to do this for you. phpMyAdmin is a powerful tool and if you don't know what you are doing, you may cause a lot of damage. Anyway, if your server is using cPanel (your webhost should tell you this), I can easily do this maintenance for you and for free - it's really just a few minutes of work. But I'd need your webhosting username & password which is sensitive information so it would be better, security-wise, if your webhost could do this. But if you want, you can send me the username & password info for your control panel (not the one for aMember) to tomfra[AT]centrum.cz - and don't forget to replace the [AT] part with @. Tomas
Thank you Tomas, I will keep that in mind! My tale of woe continues and I continue to wait for help from support. Out of frustration, I've open a new thread as I've noticed a pattern that may lead to clues as to what is happening. Please see Members Can Login but Cannot Access Subscription.