MyBB Documentation

Cannot login

The 1.6 Documentation is no longer maintained and some information may be outdated.

The MyBB 1.6 series reached end of life on October 1, 2015.

This means there will be no more security or maintenance releases for these series and forums running these versions of MyBB may be at risk of unfixed security issues. All administrators are strongly encouraged to upgrade their forums to the latest release of MyBB as soon as possible.

So every day we have people reporting that logins don't work on their forum. Let's fix this once and for all!

99% of the time this is a problem with your cookie settings being incorrect or inadequate. (For more information about MyBB's cookies, read Cookies)

Your cookie settings can be found in: Admin CP > Configuration > Settings > General Configuration. The two settings are Cookie Domain, and Cookie Path.

By default, MyBB suggests Cookie Domain to be blank, and Cookie Path to be "/". Although this theoretically will work, in many cases it is inadequate.

First a few examples of what your cookie settings should look like:

If your URL is http://www.example.com, your settings should be:

  • Cookie Domain: .example.com
  • Cookie Path: /

If your URL is http://www.example.com/myforum, your settings should be:

  • Cookie Domain: .example.com
  • Cookie Path: /myforum/

If your URL is http://subdomain.example.com/wow, your settings should be:

  • Cookie Domain: .subdomain.example.com OR .example.com
  • Cookie Path: /wow/

Alternatively you can use this tool to provide your cookie settings based on your forum's URL.

These cookie settings should work on all MyBB installations. If you have site-integration, your cookie settings may need to be more generalized.

After you change your cookie settings, please advise your users to log out and clear their cookies from their browser, so that the new cookies can take effect.

Edit this page on GitHub