WordPress MU

I have installed WordPress MU 2.8.4. The installation was successful and I received my username and password.

The problem is that when I tried to login using Internet Explorer Ver. 8, WordPress goes into an endless loop taking me back to the same login screen without giving an error message.

Now, I tried to type a wrong password, then I got this message:

ERROR: Incorrect password. Lost your password?
ERROR: Cookies are blocked or not supported by your browser. You must enable cookies to use WordPress.

Well, I then used Firefox and Google Chrome to login using the same password. It worked fine. SO the problem seems to be only with IE.

Trying to get to the root of the problem, and because the majority of my prospective users are probably using Internet Explorer, I tried to login using different PC's and different versions of IE. I even used a different operating system (Server 2003). Still the same problem.

Just to eliminate any possibility of anything else (cookis, etc) I even formated a new pc using Windows XP.

Still the same damn problem.

Just to be sure it was not a hosting issue, I have a duplicate installation running at another hosting company on a completely different server, IP, etc. Still the same problem.

Needless to say that I even tried to delete the installation and start witha fresh new copy with a bare-bone, no plugins. The same problem.

Now I tried to search through the various forums. It seems to me that other people are having reporting the same problem.

Since I am new to the WordPress MU business, I just cannot believe that an issue like this is still around after countless of development hours on WPMU and all these complains.

Now bear in mind that not only me, the admin was having this problem, but any new user that tries to create a blog had the same problem.

Go ahead and try it yourself at http://co.ps

Any help would be appreciated because I have wasted a good week trying to solve this issue without success.

This doesn't have anything to do with WPMU. Internet Explorer thinks your domain name is invalid. If you click Tools - Options - Privacy - Sites and try to add your site to the allowed list of domains, it will tell you:

"You have entered an invalid domain. Domains must be in the Internet zone and must use the http or https protocal. Blah blah blah"

I have a feeling it doesn't like that it's only 5 characters long (though that's an issue, as it is a valid domain).

I wonder, for testing purposes, if you did a sub-domain install (so that the URL would be longer) if it would work.

Oddly enough I remember in the UK you could NOT register two letter domains, they had to be a minimal of three letters, I suspect it was something to do with the way DNS handled canonical domains (xxx.co.uk etc). So maybe its linked to that.

I don't believe that is the issue because I have another site that I am using for testing purposes http://www.almasseya.com, the same problem.

Please disregard my last comment. I was able to login to http://almasseya.com using IE.
Hmmm! Perhaps it had to do with the domain name being so short. But that was the point behind the name, so anyone can register a blog like http://yourname.co.ps.

Well, my guess is that you need 1 more letter in there somewhere. I'm fairly sure it's an IE issue, though - not a WPMU issue.

Is it possible to modify the wp-login.php to handle this scenario?

Or

If we trick WPMU to use www? Would that solve it? I have seen posts on forcing WPMU to use www and I am going to try it and see what happens.

I didn't actually create a blog. Did you have it set up in sub-domain mode? (It looks like you've uninstalled right now.) You'd be able to test how IE handles logins on the subdomains with the short domain....

Yes, its is setup in a sub-domain mode. You can create a blog like http://yourname.co.ps but you cannot access it using IE.

I have also been toying with the idea of adding www. to the domain name. It worked and I was able to login using IE but when you try to create a new blog, your blog name would be http://yourname.www.co.ps !

So I uninstalled and started anew.

I also tried working with the tech support from Ipower.com, where I am hosting this site. This is what they had to say:

You can enable the cookies in the browser and set the cookies settings to ‘Low’ in the privacy section, and then try to log into the WordPress Admin panel.

Here are the steps that you need to follow to set the cookies settings to ‘Low’ in the privacy section of the Internet Explorer browser:
1) Open Internet Explorer browser.
2) Go to ‘Tools’.
3) Go to ‘Internet Options…’.
4) Click on the ‘Privacy’ tab.
5) Scroll down bar under the settings option and set it to ‘Low’.
6) Click on the button ‘Apply’.

If you continue to experience the same issue, please you can change the WordPress default blog URL from http://co.ps to http://www.co.ps/ in the MySQL database in which you have installed the WordPress application. You need to edit the ‘home’ and ‘site url’ options in the ‘wp_options’ table in the MySQL database and change the URL to http://www.co.ps/ . You can edit the via phpMyAdmin interface. To manage the MySQL databases in your account, please go to MySQL Management section in your Control Panel

I also tied a couple of different suggestions like http://manojkumar.org/install-wordpress-mu-with-www/ but was not succesful.

IE does not allow cookies to be set for two-letter domains.

http://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/ie-and-2-letter-domain-names.html

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310676

Very informative, but why IE still does not allow a new user, such as yourname.co.ps to login. Shouldn't treat it as a 10-digit domain.

And Why does IE work fine when adding www? But doesn't when someone creates a blog such as yourname.co.ps ? Does it think the www. is part of the domain, but not yourname.co.ps?

Well, after contacting tech support of Microsoft, I recievd this email from support:

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Support Center.

To make that I understand your issue, based on your description , the problem is as follows :

1- You are not able to sign in with your credentials to this web site http://www.co.ps using Internet Explorer product.
2- You can’t add this web site to the allowed list of domains.
3- You can use any 3rd party internet browsers to sign in.

Kindly be informed that this web site is not considered as a domain and so it can’t be added to internet explorer.

This is by design in internet explorer structure and we can’t guarantee that this will be changed in the future.

You need to contact the web site support to make their web site compatible with Internet Explorer as it could be created using a language that is not supported in Microsoft products.

Please note that you can contact us through phone any time from 9:00Am to 6:00Pm every day including the holidays and weekends.

I hope I was able to help you enough and thank you for contacting Microsoft Support Center.

Yep, as we've been saying. It's an IE issue. Not a WPMU issue.

And I suspect that its an IE issue based on the same reasoning for the UK not allowing 2 letter domains (which it still doesn't for .co.uk domains)

So there is no 'fix'?

I am having the same issue, but my domain is a US domain, and not subject to the bizarre rules MS employs for security.

Wordpress is installed (using the subdomain-type installation) at
http://mydomain.com, as such the individual sites are http://site1.mydomain.com, http://site2.mydomain.com, and so forth.

No one using IE anything can login to their site. I assure you, it is not a country TLD issue, or an issue with the subdomains being to short, all of the subdomains are between 15 and 20 characters long.

Is there ANY work-around at all?

How long is the "mydomain" part though?

My subdomains are all about 10-15 characters, but I found what was going on, at least in my case.

IE doesn't like underscores in the subdomain name.

I went through and check all my sites to see if the problem was universal, or not. It was not. (Some people could get in just fine, others not so much)

After polling all the sites about domain names, plugins and themes, the only thing that all the problem sites had in common that the nonproblem sites had none of, was underscores in the subdomain name. I ran some tests and changed underscores to dashes, just to verify, and I discovered that that was, in fact, the culprit.