h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The cookie mechanism for "always remember me on this computer" has just stopped working for me in Mozilla. By "just", I mean that every time since about 7pm tonight I've had to log in. I've restarted the computer, but it still won't remember me between sessions. Yes, I did check the appropriate box when I logged in. Yes, I exited the browser properly. No, it didn't work.

I haven't changed any options in Mozilla, or reinstalled any parts of Mozilla(*), so the most likely cause is a change of some sort at your end...? Comments?

(* I did attempt to install the QuickTime plugin to Opera earlier, but I believe that was after the problem first showed up.)

Nothing that I'm aware of has changed at our end. I'll check a bit, though.

Nothing has changed our end - we're definitely still sending out cookies which expire in a year, which leads to a possible answer - has your computer's date been wrongly set somehow? If you've set your date to more than a year in the future, the cookies will always expire. Unlikely, I know, but it's the only explanation I can think of.

Unless it's trying to save cookies to a file which is read only, or the disc is full, or something similar.

Definitely nothing has changed at our end, though.

That, or evil shape-changing pixie creatures.

None of the above. I'm puzzled. The most disruptive thing I've done to the system today was a Speed Disk (defrag) and I do that every couple of days. If it's still out of whack tomorrow I'll investigate deeper at this end.

One thing came out of this; I finally saw my sidebar ("My Conversations") in Brunel - the red highlighting is far better for spotting an unread conversation from across the room... Any ideas how I could get my sidebar to show in Brunel while keeping the actual conversations in Goo?

Panic ye not... The problem's definitely with my browser; I just found two more "cookie login" sites exhibiting the same behaviour.

(Bananalotto.co.uk and EZsweeps.com, fyi)

It looks suspiciously like some new passwords I asked the browser to remember pushed some of the oldest ones "off the other end"...?

I'll check the Mozilla FAQs tomorrow and see if the number of sites it remembers is in some way limited, and report it to Bugzilla if it isn't.

I just realised that theory is flawed, since logging in afresh should make this one of the "newer" passwords. Weird. Ignore me, I'm rambling...

"Any ideas how I could get my sidebar to show in Brunel while keeping the actual conversations in Goo?"

Not easily - all the URLs are absolute, and contain the skin.

I suspected that, but it was a nice thought...

This is a stupid question, but I've got to ask, is your browser (and prehaps a virus scanner/firewall) set to accept cookies? You say you havn't changed any options, but I'd check all the same if i were you.

Good luck,

Tango

Thanks for the thought, Tango, but cookies from other sites are surviving OK... It almost looks as if my cookie list was truncated in some way, as only the oldest sites lost their cookies.

I'm about to heap confusion upon confusion by "upgrading" to an Alpha release of Mozilla 1.2, partly to see if it has any effect on the problem, and partly to try out the cool-sounding new navigation features.

It logged in automatically as soon as I'd updated!

That means the cookie was always there, it's just that Mozilla 1.1 was ignoring it for some reason...

Anyhow, it's a moot point now. Onward to more interesting bugs...!

mmm very odd. I'm using Mozilla 1.1 at the moment and I've never noticed any problem.

Neither did I, right up until the day it started ignoring my stored passwords and cookies...

Even then, I preferred it to IE.

yep, me too!

Is it worth upgrading btw?