Apologies if this has been asked before, but I didn’t find mention of it. I use old.lemmy.world as my interface and I’ve noticed that roughly every month I’m:
- Forcibly logged out and have to do the re-auth dance for no apparent reason.
- Everything I’ve set in Settings is forgotten: Default Listing reverts to All, Default Post Sort reverts to Hot, and so on.
My browser is set to retain cookies and such, so it’s not PEBKAC/PICNIC. Why is Lemmy doing a nuke-from-low-orbit every month (roughly; haven’t measured it) despite me using it as recently as the day before? Isn’t this bonkers practice?
Edit: I’ve just seen https://mastodon.world/@LemmyWorld/112706805419064266 which may explain it. Either way, the questions stand.
mlmym (the “old” interface) stores its front-end specific settings in your browser via cookies and local storage. The way it’s implemented works for the most part and probably makes the front-end simpler, but has some downsides like not retaining your choices between logins. There’s an issue open for this in the bug tracker: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/issues/104
I’m not sure why it forces a logout periodically even when you’re using it regularly though. (I mean, the cookies are probably not being updated and just expire eventually – but I don’t know if that was a deliberate choice or not.) It might be a good idea to open an issue for this?
Thanks, and for that Issue link. As you say, I expect it’s just nuking the cookie and everything related to it just disappears.
At least it’s on someone’s radar. :)
Edit: I sent a message to support, as suggested by slazer2au, and got a response pointing out that 30 days seems to be hard-coded into mlmym: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/blob/a518844b005179623d0d7a31f45966cd8a6b8a96/routes.go#L794
That and those settings all being stored client-side explains everything. Not sure why those choices were made, but now I know why.