vBulletin

Problem 

Very strange permissions issues in vBulletin.

Solution 

Rebuild the bitfields by going to /admincp/index.php?do=buildbitfields

Discussion

On a new board that I was configuring, it somehow got into a weird state where the users in the Administrator usergroup had missing moderation options. In the Moderation pulldown (and in the Thread Tools pulldown), only a few of the moderation action choices were available.

I was pretty damn sure it was not a configuration issue, having triple- and quadruple-checked permissions, and creating test users from scratch. I was going crazy with frustration until I ran into this forum post that introduced me to rebuilding bitfields. Bitfields are rebuilt when products are added or removed.  Sometimes the process doesn't work perfectly.

So if you run into a crazy permissions issue that you're pretty darn sure is not a misconfiguration, try rebuilding the bitfields.

(This was for VB ver. 3.6.8)

Update 2007/8/3: Actually, it was the enabling of mod_expire in the new .htaccess that was causing all the issues. Turned off mod_expire and things got back to normal. The following is still an interesting stroll through vBulletin cookies. Users reported VB forum issues starting today. We're using vBulletin 3.6.4. (We upgraded our Drupal installation for the same domain to 4.7.7 last night, so this is likely related to that. The .htaccess file seemed like a likely culprit, but it looked okay to me. After a little searching on vBulletin login issues, the following fixed the problem.) The problem: Can't login -- immediately redirected back to login page. Not credential error. Already logged in users reported session related weirdness -- posts not showing up for some users and/or forum index info mismatch with actual forum posts. The fix: Reset cookie domain to "blank" (was: ".wisebread.com") and cookie path to "/" (was "/"). Try this if your users are having login problems Things to try when users have problems logging in to a vBulletin forum (via this vbadvanced.com post): Ask users to clear cookies and restart browsers. This is really only appropriate for isolated incidents. In our case, the problem was reported by multiple users on the same day, so we tried solutions #2 and #3. As a forum admin, reset the cookie domain and path to defaults. You can find these settings at: Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Cookies and HTTP Header Options Cookie Domain: blank