"This user is inactive. Please contact us regarding this account." error - SOLVED

Permalink 2 users found helpful
This problem is one that keeps popping up on the forum. There are at least four posts that ask about it, I'm putting the solution here and adding the permalink in reply to each of the other posts.

What people have been running into is a situation where their login appears to time out after a short period, and they are redirected to their site's login page to reenter their credentials, with the error message shown in the subject line above.

Earlier responses to the problem included looking at the ulsActive entry in the Users table, but people were reporting that this was properly set to 1, as it was for me when I ran into the problem.

The key is to look at the Logs table, which will typically have entries of the form:
Session Invalidated. Session IP "xxx" did not match provided IP "yyy".

These errors come about because the user's session is being expired by concrete5. In particular, this may happen when the IP address changes. (Incidentally, changes in IP address also interrupt posting in the concrete5 forums.)

The solution is to make the session persist over changes in IP address, as indicated in:
https://community.c9.io/t/concrete5-7-session-persistence/647/3...

The last contribution to that post did not work for me. What worked was adding an application/config/concrete.php file with the following contents:
<?php
return array(
  'security' => array(
    'session' => array(
      'invalidate_on_ip_mismatch' => false,
    )
  )
);


The effect of this file is to override the default setting in the Security section of concrete/config/concrete.php, which looks like this in 5.7.5.8:
'session' => array(
            'invalidate_on_user_agent_mismatch' => true,
            'invalidate_on_ip_mismatch' => true
        ),


If anyone has more luck with the last suggestion in the above link, I'd like to hear about it, but this change to the configuration solved the problem for me.

 
Ale replied on at Permalink Reply
Big Thanks for sharing this. I've been getting this error on almost every (of the few..) sites that we've build on 5.7.*

Someone should make a "configuration generator" page with a form for all kinds of different options that you can set up in application/config/concrete.php and it would generate the code for you.
WebcentricLtd replied on at Permalink Reply
hello - there is an add-on that looks after a lot of these settings:

https://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/handyman...

which might help in this case.
Ale replied on at Permalink Reply
Good to know that such add-on exists. Thanks.
StatLaw replied on at Permalink Reply
Glad to hear it worked for you. Did you try the add-on? I'm going to look into it too.
davpyth replied on at Permalink Reply
I try with the method for the first time this has walk but when I made an update to version 5.8 has paser all is back to the old and when I still edit the file with the same line of code that still does I need no help
StatLaw replied on at Permalink Reply
There is probably something else going on with your setup that was altered on update. You may want to try changing the same values specified above in the concrete/config/concrete.php file. If that works for you, then it is possible that your site is no longer overriding the defaults by way of the application/config directory.
davpyth replied on at Permalink Reply
that must do to customize it and not by default because I must deliver the site to my client that she only administered if your other solution I propose wedge would be good for me
ob7dev replied on at Permalink Reply
ob7dev
Awesome you found the fix for this. Chromes new developer tools cause this to happen if you switch to device view and then go to another page.
hereNT replied on at Permalink Reply
hereNT
That's what was getting me. Couldn't for the life of me figure out where it was coming from. Must have been the "user agent mismatch" booting me out. :(
zanedev replied on at Permalink Reply
zanedev
Thanks for this. In my case I was using a hotspot router from my phone 3g and apparently it randomizes requests from different IP addresses. Rather than make the configuration change I worked around it by connecting to a VPN which gave me a stable IP address for all requests.
kolepoke replied on at Permalink Reply
I'm extremely disappointed with this issue. Trying to understand the need for it. It's not good to install an application for the first time and get this type of error over and over at almost every click here and there. In my case I used my phone as hotspot because it was the only secure connection I could have by the time of the installation. Seems like Concrete5 doesn't tolerate this type of connection. Will uninstall and go back to search options for publishing.
ob7dev replied on at Permalink Reply
ob7dev
Since your phones IP address may often be changing, simply disable the security feature causing you to be signed out by doing the following:

1.) Create a text file under /application/config/concrete.php
2.) Then add the following code and save
<?php return array( 'security' => array( 'session' => array( 'invalidate_on_ip_mismatch' => false, ) ) );


at that point you shouldn't have the issue.

Let us know if that fixes the problem.