OSDev.org

When I log in, and check "Log me on automatically each visit", I keep getting logged out regardless.

There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to it, it doesn't seem time based, and it can happen in short order (on the order of minutes.)

Which means the first version of this message wasn't actually submitted, because I was logged out while I wrote it, and I lost the original text! (this is actually the third attempt at this single submission!)

This never used to happen. It seems it started after an outage a couple of years ago, which I suspect was the one reported here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/comments ... orum_down/

So I wonder if it's a flag on the forum software (phpBB?) that's not been restored?

The last time I heard of someone having this kind of issue, it was caused by a broken add-on interfering with session cookies. Have you tried disabling your browser add-ons?

Food for thought. I'll investigate by trying Firefox in troubleshooting mode.

The reason I thought it was related to the server software is I distinctly remember that outage being the trigger for the change in behaviour.

But it could be a coincidence and a false association.

FYI, I currently think this is the Live Marks:

https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/

Enabling this again logged me out within minutes, having been logged in for days.

This is an interesting observation, especially since you mentioned Firefox and session cookies.

I have a similar issue that I was getting logged out here and from another forum some time ago using Firefox and I still don't know why. I tried to investigate the issue by opening the developer toolbar, network view, before navigating to those forums, to see what data is actually transmitted when I get logged out, but the problem did not occur while I did that. So I thought that maybe it was an issue with a Firefox version I had used in the meantime that was now fixed by an update, and so I stopped investigating. But then when I went to the forums again, I got logged out again (and since this time I had the toolbar closed, I did not see the network traffic, so I still got no clue why). So I started investigating again, keeping the toolbar open and waiting for being logged out again, but it hasn't occurred since then, and so I still have no data of such an event. All I saw in the developer toolbar was the correct transmission of cookies and getting logged in. This looks like a Heisenbug to me.

If you have any progress to share or ideas what to test I'd be happy to try those out. I don't use Live Marks, but maybe some other addon that I use interfaces with Firefox in a similar way to trigger this behavior.

I use uBlock Origin. I found that the forum doesn't log me out if I disable it for the site. Maybe one of the cookies it uses for the session stuff is blocked by the plugin?

No, it's the live marks extension. I also have uBlock origin, and my first thoughts were that, so I disabled that first.

I've not been logged out in the nearly six weeks I've had it disabled, yet was almost immediately logged out when I last enabled it.

I miss Live Marks, so I'm thinking of opening an issue on it. But I'm lost on the mechanism that might be causing it, it just seems such an unrelated issue to keeping RSS bookmarks up to date.

Just now, I got logged out twice when opening the first page of the Test Beds thread, but only when there was a session id (&sid=...) in the URL. It didn't happen when opening the last page of the thread from a notification email, perhaps because there was no sid.

I got logged out by surprise the other day, too, though it wasn't repeated.

I use Firefox, but don't have an RSS reader extension in this profile. My extensions are Ublock Origin and Stylus. The latter I use on this site so I can have a good dark theme with a nicer shade of blue.

I wonder if it's anything to do with Firefox's privacy protection. It now has an option to "copy link without site tracking," implying it has code to recognize session ids. Maybe Firefox freaks on the removal of &e= with the addition of &sid=. Maybe something similar happens when a page is loaded from an RSS reader, but I wouldn't know.

...And I also got logged out when I hit Preview for this post. Maybe it was something to do with the testing I was doing on the above thread.

I don't have it. Disabling uBlock Origin fixed it for me. So for me it's uBlock Origin.

I think it might be a combination of Cloudflare and PHPBB session validation which was set to validate the first 3 octets of the client IP to prevent session stealing. I've turned that off but enabled the Validated X_FORWARDED_FOR header option.

I was also having an issue where it when I logged in and hit return to previous page, it take back to the login screen, hence creating an infinite loop. I think that fixed that issue as well.