I'm being automatically logged out of iNaturalist

Website Win Chrome, happening in last few/couple weeks but not in couple years prior to that

Step 1: Log in as usual with Remember Me setting checked

Step 2: do a bunch of stuff such as IDing or annotating

Step 3: come back later, whether the next day or a few hours later- most of the time lately a fresh login is required

Is there some anti-spammer setting I’m triggering with high-volume activity? If so I’ll be happy to keep logging back in, but figured I should report in case it’s actually unintended behavior.

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FWIW, this happens to me ~intermittently~ on iOS. More so, recently.

Sometimes, when I’ve become logged out on iNaturalist.org, I can go to iNat menu for Community->Forum (where I’m logged in, too). And, then from the Forum’s Hamburger menu I go back to iNaturalist. I then am logged in without having to type user name and password.

Next time it happens, I will try to get screenshots for a screen video.

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It may be you have a setting on Chrome enabled that automatically clears your cache every time you close the app. I don’t know if that would cause this but it might.

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I seem to get this when I login from a different computer. Usually when I login with my laptop, my desktop gets logged out.

This has happened to me all the time for quite a long time now.

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I was also going to post this but found this. Yes, this is happending to me too.

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I thought this ‘round the corner log in worked before, but I cannot reproduce it right now. I am getting logged out more often lately.

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I haven’t logged out of iNat for over 6 months, but I remember having a similar problem the few times I did.

Just to make sure you I’m undestanding you here: the problem isn’t that the browser doesn’t remember your log in information, the issue is that you are being signed out of iNat without manually doing so?

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Yes, my browser behavior has not changed recently as far as I know, and other sites like Reddit or Webtoons are still “sticky” for my site login credentials (even across months) when I have “remember me” checked on their sites.

Also across the last month or so, I have been using only a single PC and its same Chrome browser to access the site, no others. (IP address from my PC is not static and probably does change depending on my internet provider.)

I have just gone into Chrome and specifically whitelisted iNat re cookies, in case it will help. I can report back here if it doesn’t.

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Thanks!

I have never signed out of iNat, as far as I remember…yet I need to log in again quite often. MacOs Mojave, Safari.
This has been the case for a long time, couple of years I think? and I have not determined the frequency, except for a spell where it was daily, associated with not having been able to check “Remember me”.

I had assumed that iNat regularly “cleaned up” or something by requiring re-sign in, though it did sem odd that the period of time was irregular. For a while I thought it might be a month.

The last week or two it has been very frequent, and yesterday for the first time I found that when I follow a link to an iNat search, the link created in one of my own outgoing emails on a Galaxy S2 Android Tablet, on viewing the page I am signed out.

My many iNat page bookmarks are still signed in.

Not sure what it means, but my iP address is static.

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This just happened to me in Safari, will keep investigating.

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Unfortunately that has not improved the behavior over the last couple days.

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@lotteryd Can you please share a screenshot of your Cookies preferences, either here or at help@inaturalist.org? You can get there by goign to Preferences → Privacy and Security → Cookies and other site data I just want to try and replicate your settings on my end.

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Just now found myself logged out of iNat. Galaxy S3 Tablet and Android 7.0. Sign in with tablet-remembered pw, and checking remember me, worked.

I recently started using Firefox as well on this tablet, due to problems with browser tabs freezing in Chrome. Currently I am still using the Chrome bookmarks for iNat, but I may have browsed to iNat in Firefox as well at some stage, dont know if that could be relevant.

Thanks for asking for a shot, because I just noticed I didn’t have a [*.] part in front of the inaturalist.org listing. I’ve just added that and will see if it makes a difference over the next couple days. Meanwhile it now looks like this:

Update 2/19: Unfortunately I’ve still been seeing the logouts.

iOS: Only once, do I recall intentionally logging out, but sometimes I find I’m logged out.

I keep icons on my iphone and iPad Home Screens for the

  • iOS app,
  • the web app
  • the forum.

I often flit between them.

The phone’s icon link for the web app currently takes me to a page that knows it’s me (shows my OBs and the Community>Forum link takes me to the Forum logged in as me). But, it wants me to log-in.

Is that a little weird?

To edit or add records now, I would have to log in again.

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Safari in iOS is pretty aggressive about clearing cookies, so it will log you out after 24 hours.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been signed in to Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on my iMac for the past several days and have not been logged out in any of those browsers.

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Well, maybe.

:woman_shrugging: Not sure this is that kind of iOS thing though.

I have many other bookmarked sites I access far less often than iNat on my iPhone that do not log me out. This includes at least one site I only open once every few months. So, dunno.