Registration woes.

[tay666]

For some reason, registrations are not working on our message board.
We are running phpBB 3.0.8

After hitting the 'submit' button during registration, it just hangs, then eventually times out.
I haven't been able to find any kind of error being thrown up to point me to any one area to look into.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[Thoul]

Are there any modifications installed on the registration process? If you check the memberlist, does the user show up in there? Checking to see if the user shows up can tell us if the process is failing before or after a certain point.

[tay666]

No mods installed that I know of.

And the user does not show up on the member list.
As a matter of fact, we haven't been able to get a new user signed up since Feb of this year.
We had hoped the upgrade to 3.0.8 back in May would sort things out, but it didn't.

I was only promoted to the admin staff about a year ago.
And just finally given the access to cPanel about a week ago.
I have little actual experience working with php or mySQL but I understand coding and enjoy a challenge. So I figured I would poke around and see if I could find the source of our problem.

Don't know if this info will help, but I figured it wouldn't hurt
Apache version 2.2.19
PHP version 5.2.17
MySQL version 5.0.92-community
Architecture i686
Operating system linux
Perl version 5.8.8
Kernel version 2.6.9-89.35.1.EL

[Thoul]

Okay, let's check a few settings in the phpBB Admin Control Panel. On the Security settings page, check these settings:

* Check IP against DNS Blackhole List
* Check e-mail domain for valid MX record

If either of these are on, try turning them off and see if that produces any change. Both of these features have the software attempt to look at remote servers, which could potentially cause a hang up.

[tay666]

The first one was already off.
The second one I turned off over the weekend.

Thinking the same thing.
Anything that simplifies the process will eliminate a potential stumbling block.
I also turned off the CAPCHA

None of which have changed anything so far.

[tay666]

So, any other ideas?

Any way to track exactly what the system is doing once the registration is submitted?
I know that idea is a real long-shot, but figured it was worth asking just-in-case.

[tay666]

Ok. Think I may be on to something here.

Last spring we were having issues with our host and them complaining of massive amounts of server RAM being used by our board.
It was traced back to our banned user table. (apparently this is a known issue with inefficient searches due to poor indexing.)
Anyway, we emptied out our banned lists and switched to banning via htaccess.

But I got to thinking. I am sure the registration process still references that area before registering a new user.

So I started poking around in the ACP.
Under
Users and Groups > User Security > Disallow User Names

The page just sits there trying to load forever.
I mean, most of the page loads, but the drop-down to remove a disallowed name never fully finishes. I sat there for over 10 minutes and the page was still trying to load.
All the other pages in that section load just fine. Probably because those lists are now empty. But the disallowed list is not.

So. Can someone tell me where to look in cPanel to find that list, and empty it manually?

[tay666]

No one knows where to look in cPanel for the "disallowed usernames" list?

[Patrick]

Hey tay666,

If you are speaking of the database table, it is the phpbb_disallow table. I am not sure if you can simply empty the table, but if you want to give it a try, just make sure you have a backup first.

Thanks,

Patrick

[tay666]

That did the trick.
Finally got access to phpmyadmin (had to wait for the other admin to get the permissions sorted out)
No wonder that file was bogging things down.
235,590 entries in the table.

Now I just have to work on making a new disallowed user list.