Hi Everyone.
I have done a little investigation into the matter and I have possibly hit on some early results that I would like to share with you all here for further investigation by developers and users alike.
As you can imagine, I too have been afflicted with this little issue and met little to no success in finding a resolution. So I will give you all a little background information and then share what I just recently discovered.
Some weeks ago, I upgraded from 2.0.13 to version 2.2.3/4. The upgrade of course went without fail.
I decided to do some initial testing after making some modifications. I logged out of the site so I could register a new testing account to see my changes. I was hit with the same problems as mentioned here in this and other posts.
I went searching for a solution here on the forums as I always do and set out with the proper permission changes to the anonymous group to no avail.
I was rather stumped.
2 weeks ago, I made the permanent switch to Linux (I can hear the applause from the community already). In so doing, I was, for the first time, setting up linux to my liking and while exploring around I decided to create a local XOOPS environment for testing purposes.
I installed Apache2, php4 and mysql4 with no problems at all. (I rightfuly patted myself on the back for my mad newbie terminal command line skills - a week and a half without so much as thinking about booting back into windows, what can I say, I'm proud!).
So anyway, I installed XOOPS localy without a hitch, in fact it was running better then my hosted solution.
What did I find? I was able to register new users with a fresh instalation of XOOPS 2.2.3/4! Wow this is great! So I went back to my shared host online, moved all my old files and proceeded to upload/install a brand spanking new version of XOOPS with all the updates included with a new database, new tables and everything else you can salivate over.
WHAM! I was slapped with the same error that I could not reproduce on my local machine. The answer was staring me right in the face!
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /modules/profile/register.php on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.stewdio.net Port 80
Apache 1.3? Ok, we're onto something here. Listed below are the shared hosts specs and my local machines specs.
Shared Host Environment Operating system - Linux (I don't know the Distro)
Kernel version - linux-i686 2.4.26-ow3
Apache version - 1.3.33 (Unix)
PHP version - 4.3.11
MySQL version - 4.0.25-standard
My localhost.localdomain Environment Operating system - Linux (Debian/Ubuntu 5.10)
Kernel version - Linux 2.6.12-10-386
Apache version - Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
PHP version - PHP/4.4.0-3
MySQL version - 4.0.24_Debian-10ubuntu2-log
So what do you all make of the difference in Apache versions? Obviously, I'm not an expert on the user side of things when it comes to all things linux, but it seems to me that some of the new updates to Apache 2.x.x may have affected something in the profiles module. In which case, we may need a minor code revision. We can't expect all of our host providers to update to the latest Apache. This would also explain why some users have not been affected while others have.
I hope this little bit info has shed a bit of light on the issue.