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Due to the way that the South African internet system is set up, the majority of South African users experience a problem where they are automatically logged out a few seconds after logging in.

Problem

A detailed explanation of why this occurs is available here and here. The short and sweet of it is the board uses a secure connection to authenticate your login, while the rest of the board is viewed over an unsecured connection. Unfortunately some South African ISPs use two different proxy servers to handle secure and unsecured data. This makes it appear as if your IP has changed when you move back to the main area of the site, causing you to be logged out.

This does not appear to be a problem with Vodacom and most other wireless ISPs; or AxxessDSL.

This is definitely a problem with TelkomInternet.

Solution

To prevent being continously logged out, you must force both secured and unsecured traffic to be routed through the same proxy server. The easiest way to do this is to use Mozilla Firefox as your web browser and set the proxy under Tools->Option->Network->Settings. Select "Manual Proxy", enter the proxy's address in the box and tick the "use this proxy for all protocols" box. Each ISP will make use of a different proxy, so if yours is not in this list, you will have to contact your ISP to get the correct setting.

Known Workarounds

Telkom: set your proxy to "cache.saix.net" on port 8080.

Please note that this will cause you to get an access denied message when your international cap is finished, even if you are trying to browse local sites. Change your proxy back to "direct connection" if this occurs, just remember to change it again when your internation cap is reset.




If any other South Africans could post which ISP they use, whether they had problem and what they did to fix them I would appreciate it and will edit the workarounds into this post.