Right, Stoner, you’ll do. (-:
First up, I’ll caveat this by saying that I don’t believe this is a single issue, but rather there are multiple causes. I’m just exploring one here.
We’ve established that this is a cookies issue, yes? So logically, either they’re not being set correctly, or they are being set correctly and something is eating them. I’ve been watching my cookie behaviour whilst navigating the site, and here’s my current thinking:
On the login page, there’s a tick box which says “remember me.” Leaving the box empty creates a “wordpress_logged_in” cookie with an expiry date of “session.” I’m not 100% certain how a session is defined in this context, but I’ll come back to that. The pertinent point here is, a session cookie will disappear when the criteria for “session” are no longer met. Conversely, ticking the box creates a permanent cookie with an expiry date a fortnight hence (which is the WordPress default).
Now, I have that redirect URL saved on my browser address bar. I use it continually to back out of pages and return to the menu. I’d never noticed until just now, but that redirect has a side effect – it replaces the permanent cookie with a session one.
The reason I’d never noticed is, I rarely shut down either my work or home laptop, rather they go into various sleep states. As Chrome never really shuts down fully (unless you change a setting to make it do so), that session state is presumably being held open. The reason I had to log in this morning (again, I’m assuming) is because I shut down my laptop on Friday as updates were pending.
The fly in the ointment here is I just tried to replicate it with another reboot, and the login persists. So I’m thinking that for the session to actually reset, with Chrome at least, you need a reboot and for some time-out period to elapse. This might also explain why different people are having different experiences – different browsers are handling the session concept in different ways. Speculating, Safari might be more aggressive in its clean-up. I’m going to try again and leave it 20 minutes before opening Chrome back up.