Recently Above Average Idiot moved a phpBB forum to new server hardware. The move was simple enough, but the newly hosted site had a bit of an issue. Users could log in successfully, but the session would not survive closing the browser. The next time a user went to the site, they would have to log in again.

There are a million tutorials (seriously, we counted!) on solving phpBB logon issues. After hours of unsuccessful research, the answer showed up in an unrelated post. The problem was really unrelated to phpBB at all; it was a ‘bug‘ in the PHP 5.3.2 version on the new server hardware.

PHP 5.3 introduced a new configuration option named ‘request_order’.