Remote Auth podcast feed issues

I’ve been using s2Member for about 5 years now, mainly to serve subscribers a paid podcast feed. It was a pain to set up, but it’s worked well since then. Until yesterday, when I upgraded my hosting package. The upgrade was seamless and everything has worked fine since then, except for the paid podcast feed. When anyone tries to log into it, it gives them a “invalid credentials” message. I’ve tried on both Podcast Addict and iTunes on my computer and neither will log in.

I’ve had this thing in my .htaccess file for about 5 years:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]

Today I also tried this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

No idea what the extra L does, but somebody in another thread said it was important.

Here’s my log file immediately after I attempted to access the private feed with Podcast Addict.

PHP v7.1.25
WordPress v5.1.1
s2Member v170722
s2Member Pro v170722
My web host is Dreamhost, using the DreamPress Plus plan

I ran the Server Scan By s2Member and it shows that everything is working except for the “s2Member needs the MySQL extension for PHP” thing, I’ve seen other threads here that claim that warning is outdated. I do see in the code for Server Scan it’s dated 2012. I asked my host tech support about it anyway and they say all is good.

I’m hoping someone here can help me figure out why my secret podcast feeds no longer let anyone use them.

I finally got it working again tonight. I’d forgotten about an important piece of code that someone wrote for Timmyboo Henson back in 2013 back when developers still monitored these forums and attempted to help users out. It’s code that goes into the s2-hacks.php file. Somehow during my transition to a new hosting package, my s2-hacks.php file disappeared even though everything else remained, which seems weird. So for the benefit of future people having this problem and coming across my unanswered post, I suggest reading these two links:

https://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/remote-auth-not-accepting-username-password/

https://s2member.com/kb-article/hacking-s2member-plugin-w-hooksfilters-for-wordpress/

It seems bizarre that, 6 years later, we should still need to do this “hack” just to have a private podcast feed. Hopefully this becomes much easier when s2member gets updated next.

1 Like

Hi Brad!

I’m very sorry I missed your first post and you had to wait these days. :pray:

Thank you for taking a moment to post your update with the solution.

Wow, I had not seen that hack in so many years, I had forgotten about it. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I wasn’t aware that it had not been added yet. I now have it in my to-do to see about including it to s2 in the future. :slight_smile: