WordPress & Membership Plugin Cookies Issue on Certain Browsers

Issues

When using our PDA Gold with some membership plugins, there could be an issue happening occasionally on Windows desktops running Chrome. Sometimes, you might experience an unexpected redirect to the No Access page, even when you have the access permission to download the protected files.

Reasons

There are 2 main reasons why this happens:

• WordPress itself and membership plugins use cookies to detect if a user is logged-in and have certain permission or not.
  • Our plugin relied on WordPress cookies to compare and determine if users have the correct permission.
• WordPress cookies always expire at the end of the session
  • Cookies that ‘expire at end of the session’ expire unpredictably from the user’s perspective!
    • On Windows desktop running Chrome, WordPress cookies will expire automatically when you close the browser.
    • When WordPress cookies expire, our plugin understands that users are not logged-in yet, thus having no access permission to the protected files. That’s why it redirects users to the No Access page.
    • However, the membership plugin’s cookies haven’t expired yet. That’s why users can still access your protected page.

Solutions

Here is how to resolve this issue on most popular membership plugins that we’ve tested out.

Take Simple Membership as an example. It has an option to lock out members on browser close. When you turn this option on, both plugins will behave the same.

If you are unable to locate this option in your membership plugin settings, kindly contact our customer support for assistance.