Last modified: 2008-05-07 01:46:05 UTC
Even with the "remember login across sessions" flag set on login, logging into en or meta often has to be done 3 or 4 times a day. It is not clear to me why or when I get logged out; someone suggested that this may be a function of how many hits the site is getting, and that some kind of session purging is going on. This does seem to happen more frequently for logins on the en: wikipedia than on other sites. Whatever the cause, it is frustrating; particularly in the absence of universal login, I am often logged into 4 or 5 projects at once, doing work across projects (for instance, checking up on translations of the article on unrest in Belize requires working on wikinews, en:wp and other lang wps...), so having to log in to each site multiple times can be a pain.
I presume this is not due to you changing your password that often. It could be because of cookies being deleted. How reliable are "persistent" logins on other sites for you?
Created attachment 424 [details] Cookie from Meta for "persistent" login I closed the browser, deleted the cookie, logged in again using the "persistent" login checkbox and copied the cookie immediately.
You remain logged in until you close the browser, even if you delete the cookie.
I may have a workaround for this user. I was unable to keep logged in for more than a few seconds today using Firefox 1.0.4. I noticed that my enWikiUserID and enWikiUserName cookies were both set to expire right away, as soon as I logged in. My enwiki_session cookie was set to expire when the browser is closed, as you'd expect. I removed the 3 cookies mentioned above, logged in again, and it seems to be working fine now. I had not noticed these problems using IE, only using Firefox. Perhaps this user could try deleting the three en.wikipedia.org cookies and logging in again?
i am having this problem, too. no problems with persistent logins on other sites, and until today, i was able to use wikipedia without this bug. bug 2590 is probably a dup.
changed severity to blocker since i cannot reasonably perform any edits any longer. after a few seconds at most, i get logged out. sometimes i cannot even edit my own preference pages right after login.
also experiencing bug 2237, i.e. when i go back in the browser and try to edit a page, wikipedia sometimes does recognize my login and sometimes tells me i need to login. seems related.
i am also experiencing bug 2237, i.e. when i go back in the browser and try to edit a page, wikipedia sometimes does recognize my login and sometimes tells me i need to login. this is especially annoying when it recognizes my login when clicking on edit and then tells me that i have to login to add something to my watchpage when commiting the edit. seems related. changed "OS" to "All" since I and the reporter of bug 2590 are on mac.
*** Bug 2590 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #8) > i am also experiencing bug 2237, i.e. when i go back in the browser and try to > edit a page, wikipedia sometimes does recognize my login and sometimes tells me > i need to login. this is especially annoying when it recognizes my login when > clicking on edit and then tells me that i have to login to add something to my > watchpage when commiting the edit. > > seems related. > > changed "OS" to "All" since I and the reporter of bug 2590 are on mac. I also experience the same exact problem comment #8 has. In addition, when trying to login under Firefox, it logs me in, but tells me that I am blocking cookies and need to enable them in order to login. Without any action I stay logged in for that session and can edit pages and make changes. An examination of the cookies shows that Cookies are actually set, and set to expire on "Wednesday, February 15, 2006 10:11:51 AM" -- even though the time in which I logged in is "Monday, February 16, 2006 10:11:51 AM". Upon closing and re-opening of the wiki site, it says I am logged in for the first pageview or two, then when I try to do any action it tells me I have to log in.
Experiencing the bug like this on my own mediawiki-driven site. 'Persistent' logins doesn't work at all -- no login data saved between sessions, however all cookies are set up. At the same time Wikipedia's persistent login works well. -- Ilya Schurov.
I took am experiencing this bug. Even when I reset safari entirely, and try to edit a page, it prompts me for my login. I am on OS X too, so it seems to be a mac problem. It does not work with Camino either. Vince Buffalo
(In reply to comment #3) > You remain logged in until you close the browser [?window], even if you delete the cookie. That's because of caching, no doubt.
I've found that if I use a proxy (in this case, my university's) it completely fixes the problem. However, this is inconvenient due to the lag but it may offer some sort of insight into what's going on. Vince Buffalo
Working with the extremely helpful people on #mediawiki, I've learned that this problem is probably due to timezone settings. Initially I used php v. 5.1.2 which I guess requires timezones to be set. My web host did not do this, so the session cookies would be set incorrectly. When I jumped down to php version 5.0 which has different date and time properties it worked fine. So I guess either set date.timezone or use php 5.0
I experiencing the same bug, I can't stay logged on, as soon as I click any link I loose my login. I have php 5.1.2 installed. I am using Windows 2003 - IIS server and MySQL database. I have tried setting the date.timezone in the php.ini using the command Localtimezone= Australia/Melbourne. I have also changed in my LocalSettings.php as follows: $wgLocaltimezone="Australia/Melbourne"; putenv("TZ=$wgLocaltimezone"); $wgLocalTZoffset = date("Z") / 60; This has not resolved my problem. Please help - I am not really keen on installing php version 5.0.
(In reply to comment #15) > Working with the extremely helpful people on #mediawiki, I've learned that this > problem is probably due to timezone settings. > Initially I used php v. 5.1.2 which I guess requires timezones to be set. My > web host did not do this, so the session cookies would > be set incorrectly. When I jumped down to php version 5.0 which has different > date and time properties it worked fine. So I guess > either set date.timezone or use php 5.0 Where do I change the date.timezone and what is the syntax?
Timezones affect only display of timestamps in the user interface and should not have any relation whatsoever to this.
Maintaining a persistent login has become a hit-or-miss proposition for me. I've managed to get the system to "remember me" between SeaMonkey browser sessions for en.wikipedia, de.wikipedia, commons.wikimedia and en.wikiquote, but the mechanism appears to be COMPLETELY BROKEN for en.wiktionary now. I've done all the usual things -- cleared the cache, cleared the cookie file (even manually deleted cookies.txt), but nothing seems to fix it. Moreover, testing my login with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 today, it appears it can't maintain a login even for ten seconds at en.wikipedia! As soon as I click on the Log In button and then click the Return to Main Page link, it shows "Log In / Create Account" at the upper left part of the screen. The browser is, in fact, still logged in, but the display on the Main Page is lying. To access one's talk, preferences, watch and contribution page links, one needs to manually navigate away from the Main Page by, say, clicking on the Random Article link at the left side of the screen. If I shut down Internet Explorer and restart it, at the Main Page it displays "Log In / Create Account", but clicking on the Random Page link reveals that the persistent login cookie is working. For some reason the Main Page is lying to Internet Explorer. After running these tests with IE6, I returned to the problem of en.wiktionary not maintaining the persistent login cookie in SeaMonkey. It turns out that the cookie IS working, except the Main Page is lying, just as it does with IE6 and en.wikipedia. By clicking on the Random page link, it shows that I'm still logged in.
(In reply to comment #19) > As soon as I click on the Log In button and then click the Return to Main > Page link, it shows "Log In / Create Account" at the upper left part of the > screen. I meant to say "upper right" part of the screen.
That's a recent caching-related issue, which should be worked around now or soon.
> As soon as I click on the Log In button and then click the Return > to Main Page link, it shows "Log In / Create Account" at the > upper left part of the screen. The browser is, in fact, still > logged in, but the display on the Main Page is lying. The browser is caching the main page. This is independent from the bug here.
The history of this bug seems to conflate several separate issues over the course of a couple years... A couple quick notes: * The token cookie for the "remember this login" checkbox is reset each time you do it. This means you can only have your persistent session open for one browser at a time for each site -- doing it on another browser will invalidate the token the first browser had saved. * The IIS server noted above sounds like a typical issue with PHP session data not being kept on the server due to misconfiguration. * There was a caching issue breaking some cookies specifically a couple months ago. I'm going to go ahead and close this bug as a WORKSFORME on assumption that the really old problems got resolved one way or another; if it does still happen, we can't hope to investigate without being able to interact directly with somebody encountering it.