The fact that no-one has reported this before makes it likely that this is caused by a plugin or theme conflict. Try changing to the default 2014 theme, and deactivating all other plugins to see if that eliminates the problem. (Of course, you might not want to do this on your live site, but you no doubt have a test site where you can do this.)
I’d also check what you have (if anything) in your mu-plugins folder that might be causing a problem.
I’d also check all your levels and the settings in s2Member’s General Options.
People did report this before – from the very day we started the site. The problem is that it doesn’t always happen. It just happens occasionally. This isn’t a known issue, then?
And we are not especially web-savvy. We don’t have a test site where we can mess with big changes like you describe – changing the theme, for instance, could very well break everything permanently, and this isn’t the easiest error to reproduce in any case. It probably happens 1 out of every 20 times one tries to navigate to a page, but sometimes it will get stuck and do the same thing over and over.
The problem seems to be that the s2member plug-in just doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the person is logged in when pages are navigated to directly.
I wouldn’t know what settings to check in s2member’s general options, nor what I should be looking for in the mu-plugins folder.
Thanks for your time.
James
When I said “The fact that no-one has reported this before …” I was referring back to the fact that you had searched for the issue and not found it. That tells you it’s not a “known issue”. If it were, it would be a real problem!!
So this is almost certainly something specific to your site. Unfortunately, by far the most likely thing is a plugin conflict, and the only way to test for that is to deactivate the other plugins. That’s just how WordPress works.
It’s not as simple as s2member not acknowledging that someone is logged in. Even a logged-in user should be redirected to the Membership Options Page (MOP) in certain circumstances.
The question, then, is whether you have misconfigured your setup (e.g. set the access required for a post or page at the wrong level, so that users are denied access, or done something wrong with the MOP) or whether another plugin (or, perhaps, the theme, or something to do with your host) is interfering with the way that s2member is supposed to operate.
You could try turning on logging (see s2Member -> Log Files (Debug)) to see if that records something helpful if/when the problem recurs.
I would also suggest you install a dedicated logging plugin to record everything that happens on your site. That will provide even more information and make it much easier to track down the problem. I’d suggest either Stream or ARYO (or both).
