In any event, I PM’ed Carleas both a link to this thread as well as what I think the problem could be. Unfortunately, I lack sufficient permissions to even identify whether that is the problem or not, much less fix it. My status as Staff Emeritus affords me a few permissions that you don’t have, but that’s not one of them.
While it’s usually a user-side issue, this time it may have something to do with some recent back-end changes. I changed our DNS provider and registrar, and I don’t know that that would affect it, but it would make sense if the cookies don’t carry over after the change as a precaution against man-in-the-middle attacks.
Can you try deleting your cookies? That’s kind of an unplug-it-and-plug-it-back-in solution, but since it’s affecting only certain users it’s worth a shot.
That happened to me when I first signed in her. The “Automatically log me in” thing worked to prevent the problem but for some reason I am still always hidden without asking it to do that. It works well enough for me.
Cookies are small files that sites use to remember information specific to users. When you go to a site, the site will check to see if you have their cookies, and pull any information they need from them. They are used to automatically log you in when you visit ILP, and to show you the right style, posts-per-page, things like that.
If you’re using Chrome, you can clear your cookies as follows: go to the ILP homepage, click the “Not secure”* warning to the left of the URL, and select ‘Cookies’ at the bottom of the menu. Then select “ilovophilosophy.com” and click “Remove” at the bottom.
You’ll then need to log back in and that will create new cookies, so if the problem was with the cookies this should fix it.
Let me know if you have any trouble.
*“Not secure” means we don’t use end-to-end encryption, so don’t send e.g. bank details or things like that via PM.
Meno, sorry. I did not notice this at first.
Most issues eventually appear to phase out I suppose but with someone/something working behind the scenes.
As for your last two lines, I have no idea about that. I wonder though. I would be quite curious to see where that would/will take its members. Knock Knock? Neil Gaiman opens door.
Did you need to log back in after you deleted your cookies?
How many cookies does it say are in use on ILP? (mine says “5 in use”)
Do you have any ad or tracker blockers enabled (Ghostery, uBlock, etc.?), or are you using private/incognito mode?
Can you say more about what it means that it seemed to work?
No one, I would hope. I just wanted to clarify that that’s the kind of insecurity they’re talking about; “not secure” to me sounds a lot more threatening than it is in the context of a message board. It’s probably a good default, but it’s a bit of an overreaction here.
The cookies should be there, and 11 is right (turns out my ad blockers were blocking 6 of them, which tells me you don’t have an ad blocker :), but I wanted to make sure they were there initially to see if your browser was storing them at all. And they should repopulate after you removed them and logged back in, so that’s expected behavior as well.
I’ve made a couple changes to how sessions are validated that I hope will fix it, let me know if you still have the issue.