Replies showing as wrong username
Printed From: Web Wiz Forums
Category: Web Wiz Web App Support Forums
Forum Name: Web Wiz Forums
Forum Description: Support forum for Web Wiz Forums application.
URL: https://forums.webwiz.net/forum_posts.asp?TID=31345
Printed Date: 29 March 2026 at 9:42am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.08 - https://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: Replies showing as wrong username
Posted By: pete31
Subject: Replies showing as wrong username
Date Posted: 14 March 2016 at 1:23pm
Hi
We seem to have a problem with our WebWiz Forum
When someone posts a reply to a topic, it is not showing the correct author.
It doesn't happen all the time, but we have had over 35 replies (in the last 3 days) which are all lised as being from "John_Smith". These are from various IP addresses - so it is not one particular computer.
The IIS logs show the real usernames.
We have Active Directory setup and users do not need to logon to the forum - so their windows username matches their forum username.
Any ideas what may have gone wrong?
We have restarted the web server, but suspect this is an application or database issue - seeing as the IIS logs appear correct.
I believe we are running 10.17 (looking at the source code).
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Replies:
Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 14 March 2016 at 1:49pm
When using the Windows Active Directory integration the username is read in from the Windows Server in the file functions/functions_windows_authentication.asp using the lines below;
'Get windows authentcated username
strAuthenticatedUser = Request.ServerVariables("AUTH_USER")
'If the method above fails use the following
If strAuthenticatedUser = "" Then strAuthenticatedUser = Request.ServerVariables("LOGON_USER")
This is the part that gets the username. If there the username is incorrect then it at this part that reads in the username.
There is no built in default of "John_Smith" so if this username is being displayed then this username must be being read in by the lines referred to above.
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Posted By: pete31
Date Posted: 14 March 2016 at 1:54pm
I made up "John_Smith" to protect the identity of the real user
e.g. One real user (who has been a member of the forums for some time) is having posts showing as her that have actually been made by circa 30 different people.
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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 14 March 2016 at 2:03pm
You would need to debug using the information that was given previously in my last reply to workout why the way your server is setup the line below is reading in the wrong username from Active Directory;
'Get windows authentcated username
strAuthenticatedUser = Request.ServerVariables("AUTH_USER")
Maybe after this line you could add
Response.write(strAuthenticatedUser)
To print in the browser what username is being read in from Active Directory then tweak the settings on the server to get the right user read in.
If you have applied windows updates recently possibly these have caused the issue.
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Posted By: pete31
Date Posted: 14 March 2016 at 2:20pm
I'm not sure how that will help. The IIS logs show the correct user.
Is this something you can provide further support on if we renew our support contract?
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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 15 March 2016 at 12:25pm
Web Wiz Forums does not read in the username from the IIS logs and the two should not be considered as being related.
I would advise to try adding the line I mentioned before in order to see first hand what username is being read in by web wiz forums.
If it shows that the wrong username is being read in then it will identify that something within the servers settings is causing the forum to read in the wrong username.
If the correct username is read in but the post is under a different username it would point to the issue being in web wiz forums.
If you have support it would allow you to create a support ticket and if your forum is on a public server can look at it to see if can find the issue.
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Posted By: pete31
Date Posted: 15 March 2016 at 12:51pm
I have just this minute ran a test with one of the people affected by this user.
I ran a test.asp page from the same directory as webwiz, it reported the AUTH_USER and LOGON_USER as the correct details - e.g. the real person.
The web forums are showing a permission error when trying to reply to the topic (as I temporarily suspended the forum account for the person that is getting all of these posts attributed to her by mistake).
I removed the session ID from the address bar, and the real user was able to post - thus replying as her self.
I suspect something is up with output caching on the IIS server farm (4 x Windows 2008 R2 with F5 load balancing, DFS replication and IIS Shared Config) - that is my next thing to look at.
We've never seen this issue before, but the forum is being used for a big internal communication campaign therefore the number of visitors could be a lot more than usual.
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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 15 March 2016 at 2:12pm
Load balancing does tend to cause issues with Classic ASP. I would avoid this if you can.
Even under heavy load Web Wiz Forums should run fine on a single server. We have seen web wiz forums that we host on a Virtual Server getting over 4,000 concurrent connections in IIS and coping with the traffic without issue.
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Posted By: pete31
Date Posted: 15 March 2016 at 2:37pm
Just found something which looks a bit strange in the database table "sessions"
The IP address column seems to be truncated after the second octet
All the sessions have IP addresses like '10.105.' or '10.100.'
There are multiples of these, e.g. two rows that share the IP '10.100.' although they have different session IDs and session data.
Should the session table contain the complete IP address?
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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 16 March 2016 at 8:45am
No, only the /16 network address is used and not the whole IP.
If the IP does not match a new session would be created and the user would need to login again.
The reason why only the first part of the IP is used for this additional security check is that some ISP's such as AOL use NAT's that change the IP as the user browses the web but stays within the same /16 network address range.
The IP Session Checking can be turned of from the admin area if you did not want to use this or it causes problems, but this would not have any affect on your issue.
I still suspect the issue is the wrong username is being read in from AD, but without doing the debugging that I asked you to do before there is no way to know if the issue is a server setup issue of an issue with the web wiz forums code.
I suspect more on the side of the server setting issue causing the wrong username to be read in from AD.
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Posted By: pete31
Date Posted: 16 March 2016 at 4:42pm
We've made a change to the cache settings, so far so good. Hopefully the issue doesn't repeat. Thanks for the info.
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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 17 March 2016 at 10:01am
Good to hear that you track down the issue and have found a solution.
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