When I visited my forum I do not exactly know what happened, but as the admin, I cannot login it keeps on giving me this error message “You exceeded the maximum allowed number of login attempts. In addition to your username and password you now also have to enter the confirm code from the image you see below”.

I followed what the error message is saying but to my disappointment it wouldn’t just work. I even tried clearing my browsers cache, flushdns from the command line, rebooted my modem / router etc. etc. and my friend none of those worked.

It felt like there is something wrong within the database or on the forum itself, I suspected someone might have tried hacking on my account and used the maximum limit of attempts a user can have when logging in.

So I checked the database via cpanel and compared it with my backup, Well you wont exactly see the the password itself even if you are an admin because it is encrypted or hashed but you will still see the hashed and you can compare it with your backup just to ensure that it was not changed into something else.

And so that’s what I did and found nothing unusual or nothing was changed, Hmmm okay so where do we go from here I said to myself if my password was not change then where could be the issue?

What I did was a little googling and surprisingly I found this simple command that fixed the issue:

UPDATE phbb_users SET user_login_attempts = 0 WHERE user_id > 1;

Very simple right? I may not know but other users might have experienced the same because I never asked.

In case you do not know where to apply that code just login to your cpanel and click on SQL then copy and paste the code. then hit Go.

Tags: error, fix, PHPBB, solution

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