Touch of the mysterious about remembered logins on this site! They just work for some, whilst others have endless bother. It appears there are several causes including:
- On the client
- Browser cookie policy
- Browser bug or version mismatch with server
- Security Software policy
- Time-outs due to slow network or slow computer
- Corrupt cookie
- At the server
- Load shedding due to overload. (Note the server supports all MyTimeMedia's websites, not just this one, so heavy activity on 'Patchwork and Quilting' might disrupt Model Engineering. ) Heavy activity could be caused by users, a search engine spider, virus scanning or other maintenance.
- Web server bug or version mismatch with client
- Time-outs due to network congestion.
- Logging out when multiple devices connect to the same account.
- In the network.
- Routing errors
- Cookie invalidated by re-issue of Dynamic DNS addresses by the client's ISP (not sure this website compares IP addresses, some do)
- Lost, corrupt or duplicate packets (system normally recovers automatically from transmission errors but nothing works perfectly all the time…)
Been several attempts to pin down the problem. Doesn't appear to be operating system or browser specific, but there may be a correlation between chaps with older equipment, who also use more than one device, and have a slow network connection. Oddly, many members never see the problem at all, while others get it in clusters.
Generally speaking, it's not best practice to leave a computer logged in to anything. Remembered login facilities encourage bad security habits and waste computer resources, which mattered 45 years ago when I was taught not to do it! As the security objection is still good, I still always log in and out: doing so refreshes all things computer between me an http://www.model-engineer.co.uk. Once in a blue moon I'm logged off the site mid-session: since getting 50Mbits/s broadband this has always been obviously associated with a network problem.
Keep trying, and if anyone proves what causes it, please report back! I think it's combinations of the problems I listed above, not a single easy to fix tweak.
Dave