Last modified: 2013-02-27 23:16:01 UTC
It is my understanding that if you tick the "Remember my login on this computer" when you log in normally, your login session should last as long as $wgCookieExpiration (default 30 days). On my wiki, regardless of the length of time my cookie is set for, PHP's garbage collection (or Debian's cron script) will remove PHP sessions older than gc_maxlifetime, which causes the user to need to log in again - by default, after 1 hour. Not popular in my office! It strikes me that there is a dependence on information on the session which would normally be stored in cookies, and there is a bug here - at the very most you should get the MW "Your session has expired" error message if your session were garbage collected.
I think one solution will be to adjust garbage collector not to remove session data more often then $wgCookieExpiration or use memcached or APC for session storage so it's not garbage collected. Another solution would be the one you suggested on a mailing list - to use cookie to store long term login flag and attempt immediate OpenID login in cases when session information is lost.
Mass maintainer change.
I never saw this problem. Pls. reopen, if you still have this problem, and indicate then the exact git version numbers of your mediawiki core and the openid extension.
