Forum always logs out when leaving

Breaking this out of the “Hey, how can I get Discourse to do X?” thread and giving it it’s own topic, because I think it’s a Discourse issue and I’m running out of things to try.

Two weekends ago, this forum (and only this forum) has started logging me out every time I leave the site and forces me to log back in when I return. I don’t clear cookies or site data on browser exit, but I did try this as an attempt to fix the problem and it didn’t have an effect. I implemented 2fA here to see if that’d make a difference (it didn’t) and there’s nothing being blocked that I can see. Qt3 is whitelisted; I believe Google Analytics is the only script not running, but it’s been that way for years. I would have thought it to be a Fx problem but I noticed Chrome is doing the same thing when I switched to it to bypass the problem.

Usually, this sort of issue is transient or easily corrected but this one has me stumped. Was there anything on the forum end that changed in the last couple weeks? It’s behaving like it isn’t saving a cookie properly, or can’t read ones that are set.

Have you tried this without running any add-ons on either browser?

No such issue here on mobile or my desktop Chrome. But I don’t run add-ons.

Good tip, but trying no add-ons had no effect on it.

I think I managed to fix Chrome, somehow, after many logons and exiting browser/site. I think it had to do with clearing cookies/cache on exit, which makes sense to me, but not sure why it was doing it in the first place. Toggling the settings on/off seemed to have worked, though.

Firefox, however, is another matter and nothing I’ve done seems to fix it. But, knowing that it’s now limited to Fx only (Edge seems to be fine) suggests that something happened to Fx a couple weekends ago that changed its behaviour. I just need to figure out what it was without refreshing it to default and starting over with a new profile. Glad to know it’s not a Discourse/forum problem, as I hate banging my head against a wall over something I’ve no ability to fix.

Does a new profile fix it? If it does, you know that was indeed your problem. You can start firefox with a fresh profile without deleting your old one, start it with the -profilemanager flag.

Yep, bang-on. The new profile had no issues saving the logon. So, now to decide if I just want to restart with a new profile, or figure out what’s wrong with my current one by adding things to this new test profile until it breaks. The troubleshooter/debugger in me wants to do the step-by-step testing, but on the other hand, I’d like to get on with life.

Get this, once I switched back to the original profile where it wouldn’t save my logon, it worked! I see that it starts to load Qt3 without me logged in but than immediately refreshes and I’m logged in. This is too weird. But I’m happy that it’s working for now. Thanks @stusser for the profile push.

Ain’ no thang.

But I spoke too soon. The problem has returned after leaving it for a few hours. sigh But, this time when I clicked on the Fx address bar area where the lock icon is, it offered me the option to turn off blocking (it didn’t have this option before). Doing so immediately logged me in even though it had me logged out. Huh.

I’m just going to slide this in here for future reference: turns out, visiting the forum will always first show me as logged out in Fx. Upon refreshing the page, I’m logged in. Not sure what that’s about, but at least I don’t have to go through the login/2FA process each time.

Your blocker is clearly messing something up, just whitelist Qt3. Only tracker is google analytics.

Qt3 is whitelisted/allowed in everything that I could find (I even turned on Google Analytics just so there’s nothing blocked). I don’t mind a little reload of the page. But yeah, it’s obvious it’s something broken in one of the blockers. One day it’ll just start working again.

Thanks for the assists.