For all you users who are having trouble logging in, or staying logged in.
I’ve found a partial work-around that seems to work for me.
If you are logged in (you think) and click on Edit or Quote or New Thread or Post Reply and you get a spurious log-in prompt screen (but you know you were logged in on the screen you just came from) . . .
Just click on your browser’s BACK button and go back to that screen where you were logged in, and then click on Edit or Quote or New Thread or Post Reply again.
This works just as well (or not) as if you actually bother to enter your user name and password again (that is, you might still have to try it a bunch of times). But, just like entering your name and psw again, it seems that it will eventually work, and it’s a lot less bother than typing your name and psw over and over.
AND, if you just took all the time to type your whole post and you click Submit (or Preview) only to get a log-in screen then (WTF?), it seems you can do the same. I think. HINT: Copy your post to your clip-board, or somewhere, just in case you end up losing it before you succeed in posting it. But I haven’t actually had that happen yet.
In navigating from page to page, we’re seeing a lot of cases of users, who were logged in, suddenly aren’t logged in any more. And it’s happening when you try to post or quote or edit things, as we’ve been noticing. And some have speculated that there’s a problem with cookies. Well, maybe. There’s clearly a problem with something.
But notice: As implied in the post above, if you suddenly find yourself not logged in, you can always go back to the previous page where you were logged in. And on that page, you are still logged in. How does that work?
I think I’ve figured it out. Your log-in status isn’t in a cookie, which would (or should) be transmitted from page to page. Rather, your log-in status is a self-contained attribute of each individual page itself. Thus, if you go to a new page and suddenly find you’re not logged in (which is still a bug of some sort), you can still go back to the previously page, and still be logged in on that page.
That’s why the trick mentioned in the OP works, it seems.
This is implemented by putting your log-in status into several hidden text box fields in the page itself, rather than in a cookie. You can see them if you view the page source, and search for the word “hidden”. Look for text boxes with this attribute. (As any web programmers must know, this is an established way for pages to preserve state information, which can be transmitted back to the server when you click on anything, that doesn’t involve cookies.)
Mods: Is this worth making sticky?