jennblake posted at 8:31AM Mon, 14 December 2020 - #4407366

I don't understand this "much JavaScript mediation" in your post. can you please explain further.

No problem. But first of all, something similar happened today: When I came to the store (using a bookmark of the "What's new" page) I noticed I was (seemingly) not logged in anymore (unlike yesterday). I assumed you had tested my account and reset the session, so I dutifully clicked on the "Login" link on top left of the page. Result, the same "JavaScript meditation", and then I landed once again on the store homepage, already logged in. No need to enter any credentials.

It seems the store gets confused about your status, and it is not just a simple binary logged/unlogged thing, there is apparently also the "logged in but not really" "Schrödinger cat" status I've experienced yesterday. According to the little indicator on top left, yesterday I was already logged in, yet the store wanted me to enter my password again (it knew my login though, just wanted the password, which was suspicious).

In both cases, what seemingly fixed this, was clicking on a "Login" link. I don't know what this link points to, but clicking it while in "session limbo" results in what I called "JavaScript meditation", that is, it starts loading a page, but is interrupted by a 20+ seconds timeout where nothing visible happens. After waiting those 20-30 seconds, loading resumes and you get dumped at the store homepage, this time really logged in, no questions asked. While this happens there is no message, just the waiting (I guess either for some dead connection to time-out, or for the session engine to solve the wave collapse function...). I'm using Firefox (latest, v.83) on Linux.

I want to stress the fact that the rest of the site is quite snappy, so that 20-30 seconds timeout when you click that "login" link is clearly due to the session management problems. It always ended up (for me, so far) restoring the session to full validity, without me having to do anything, and everything is fine for a while (a day apparently) before degrading again to some variant of the "Schrödinger cat" status.