SERIOUS problem- customers being logged in as other customers, super slow, etc. HELP!

i have two serious bugs on my cart and i have no idea what to do about them. they keep getting worse and worse and i dont know how!!

first, customers are being logged in as other customers. they put stuff in their cart and come back and they are suddenly in another customers cart and their stuff is gone. this is happening to almost EVERYONE who comes now.

the cart is also INCREDIBLY slow. i use dreamhost, and all sites hosted on the same server work just fine - only the cart is very, very slow (taking minutes to load one page).

please, help me!! i have no skills in programming and i am at a loss as to what to do. now nobody will order anymore because these two problems together are too terrible. please, HELP!

url to the site?

Neither of those is a bug-

You or your customers have posted URLs with an active session ID somewhere and when that gets clicked they see the ssession of the other person.

Solw is your host - do a search for dreamhost.

URLs with an active session ID - im not sure what that means. how can i get rid of this problem, if thats what is causing it? my dreamhost admin is someone else, but they also probably wouldnt know what this means...

and the url is sunyshore.com/cart

here is what a customer has said when i asked about that...

"What they're saying isn't true, I don't think.
They're saying that when you or somebody else posts the shop link, the URL has the encoded login info in it, so it's pretty much linking to that specific user's shop view.
I don't think it's true, because just clicking a link SHOULD NOT be able to automatically log you in as that person. That's just ############## insane. And it's not like if I were to just refresh everything would be normal- I can go and add a million items to someone else's cart if I want.

But whatever the problem is, until it's solved I don't feel safe buying anything ;__; People kept messing with my cart and I kept accidentally messing with theirs... its just a huge mess."

customers are going to the site with my normal URL, sunyshore.com/cart, and this is happening. they arent clicking some weird random link to go there. this is happening to almost EVERY customer. before it only happened sparingly. please help me!

heerosferret:

customers are going to the site with my normal URL, sunyshore.com/cart, and this is happening. they arent clicking some weird random link to go there. this is happening to almost EVERY customer. before it only happened sparingly. please help me!

Please post your settings for "Configuration", "Sessions".

someone else has now advised: "You should be able to fix this by forcing your scripts to limit sessions to cookies stored on the client instead of passing the sessionid around through parameters.". is that what sessions options can do for me?

Session Directory /home/hekshano/sunyshore.com/cart/cache
Cookie Domain True Info
Force Cookie Use False Info
Check SSL Session ID False Info
Check User Agent False Info
Check IP Address False Info
Prevent Spider Sessions True Info
Recreate Session False Info
IP to Host Conversion Status true

thank you!

As it has not been explained well I will give it a shot. Somewhere you or someone has posted a link to your store that has the session id on the end of the url......it will look like &zenid=krs1uq3vmjj43vb5abpivkfv51
Everyone that uses that link to come to the site will have the same session id....not good. If you have put link to your site out there you need to go check them for the session id

thanks for the explanation!
but i dont know how i am supposed to find that... anyone could have posted it anywhere.

would this solve the issue?
"You should be able to fix this by forcing your scripts to limit sessions to cookies stored on the client instead of passing the sessionid around through parameters."

The best way to prevent customers from getting into other customers' sessions is to turn the "Recreate Session" setting on ... ie: to True.

It's too bad that using that option usually breaks sites that are hosted by Dreamhost.

Did you force the cookies? I am asked to login before checking out.

DrByte:

The best way to prevent customers from getting into other customers' sessions is to turn the "Recreate Session" setting on ... ie: to True.

It's too bad that using that option usually breaks sites that are hosted by Dreamhost.

Ok, I wonder if you can give me a little more info on this as I have some carts set this way on DH with no issues (yet)... is this a Dreamhost issue, a PHP issue, or what?
How would the site 'break' if using this setting?

Thanks!