Here are the steps to reproduce this problem:
- Be on a device where I am not logged-in to a meta site.
- Go to the main *.stackexchange.com site - Everything seems to work fine.
- Go to the meta.*.stackexchange.com site and click
log in
in the title bar - Page just refreshes without logging in. WTF?
Here is the workaround I have found to work:
- Go to main *.stackexchange.com site and click on
help
=>meta
- Click through the warning about the bad SSL certificate.
- Log-in works.
I'm not fussy about whether my connection to SE is encrypted. However, I do care that this problem created a barrier to my participation in meta.*.stackexchange.com. I cared and knew enough to poke at this thing for five minutes and find a workaround so I could vote on a meta item that I cared about. I doubt, however, that this is the case for most users. It concerns me that participation in meta is being filtered by a technical problem.
I use chrome as my browser, and my google account to authenticate. The problem exists on both Travel and English se.com on both a Windows 7 and 8.1 machine.
This question seems similar. However, the symptoms are different in two ways: In my case no login page is ever presented, and I'm not using OpenID.