This problem continues to be an issue, any assistance iNat tech support can render would be extremely appreciated as this issue has occurred for me for over a year.
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@tiwane can you offer any assistance with this long term issue?
This has started happening to me, too. As of anout three weeks ago.
are you also using the website from an iOS device?
i wonder if the cryptographic signature could be limited to ASCII characters instead of UTF-8 (or something like that)?
No, Android. And it happens on the computer too.
thatās strange. do you use some sort of setting or extension that would effectively clear your cookies or something like that?
No. Vanilla settings
At this point I canāt, Iām sorry. Iāve been testing this on my iPhone 13 Pro today, running iOS 16.2. What seems to consistently happen is that I get logged out if I quit the browser rather than just put it in the background. This only happens if I donāt tap āRemember meā Is that consistent for others as well?
If I do tap āRemember meā, I stay logged in even if I quit the browser.
For what itās worth, I have also been experiencing this issue for a number of years. I donāt see enough predictability in the pattern to make my report useful in debugging, but it might help to know that a number of people using a number of different platforms etc experience this. In brief:
- I use Firefox (currently version 109) on Linux
- I always tick REMEMBER ME, and it generally does indeed remember me
- However, every once in a blue moon I am suddenly logged out and I am forced to log in again
- This never happens in the middle of a session; only when I freshly open iNat (i.e. after a restart)
- No other website that I use has this intermittent auto-logging out issue
- This does not coincide with me clearing history, cookies, or any other browser-related action that I can identify
- I am not using an ad blocker but I do blacklist certain domains in my /etc/hosts file - but changes here do not coincide with the auto-logging-out issue
- I would roughly guess that the time I do remain logged in varies between 2 weeks and 3 months and there is absolutely nothing I can think of at this stage that triggers this (that is not to say it is not caused by something obscure and seemingly unrelated action that I undertake, but itās not something obvious like upgrading my computer, changing browser settings or deleting cookies). The last time this happened was March 7.
Thatās it - I donāt expect this leads to an immediate fix but I hope it helps understand a bit more of the extent of the problem.
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Typically, the āremember meā feature works by setting a non-transient cookie. Those cookies come with a lifetime. Could it perhaps be that the āexpiresā value of the cookie uses a wrong date/time format?
Right now I tried to open iNat and I was forced to log in again. Just reporting this to keep track of the frequency of the problem and to see if other people had the same issue today.
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April 7 is exactly one month since March 7. good information.
EDIT: i just logged into iNat from Firefox with the remember me option checked, just to see what the remember_user_token cookie looks like. it was created April 7, and the expire date is April 21. so it looks like 2 weeks is the life of the token before it needs to be renewed.
I got logged out again. Itās May 7th. So clearly there is SOMETHING that makes iNat log me out every month. No idea what, but at least some sort of a pattern is arisingā¦
can you set a calendar reminder or something like that to check your cookies on June 6 and then again just before you log in on June 7? it might be useful know what the expiration date on your renewal token is then.
Will do!
I hope this doesnāt count as necromancy, but this is still a continuing issue for me in Firefox. In fact I just logged in about five minutes ago, and itās already logged me out again on reloading the main iNat pageā¦I think that might be a record time. 
The session cookie says it expires Oct. 30 so itās being a bit quick on the trigger there. 