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When I get a notification in my inbox in the upper left corner about an event on one of the SE sites other than the one I am logged into, frequently I have to login again. This is mildly annoying, but becomes massively so e.g. when I am visiting from a loan computer using the browser's "private mode".

I see no reason why authentication should be necessary. As far as I am aware, there is no way to have different passwords on different sites, so the site which is serving me the link already knows who I am, and what my credentials are; this information should be possible to relay to the receiving site as well (though I am probably not qualified to specify exactly how).

Steps to repro:

  • Have accounts with the same user ID on two sites in the SE network.
  • Log in to one of them using the "private" mode in your browser.
  • Wait for something on the other site to cause a notification to appear in the supercollider (red circled 1 in upper left corner in the desktop view; upper right in mobile)
  • Open the menu and select the new notification.

Expected outcome:

  • Transparently transferred to the sister site to the event which I was notified about

Actual outcome:

  • Need to authenticate on the sister site; land on its start page (adding insult to injury)
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  • given that privacy mode prevents cookies and the like from being saved and passed around from site to site (and this is a feature - you don't want facebook knowing what you're searching for in Google or whatever) how do you think this would be implemented?
    – Kate Gregory
    Mar 30, 2015 at 17:03
  • @KateGregory: I'm thinking maybe embed some sort of token in the link URL itself? But if privacy mode can't be fixed easily, I would be delighted if it worked even just in my normal browser. Just now, for example, I arrived here from Stackoverflow, and had to log in again, and landed on the MSE start page and had to click the notification a second time in order to be able to respond to you.
    – tripleee
    Mar 30, 2015 at 17:51
  • That's not what happens in non-private mode for me. Do you have something nonstandard going on?
    – Kate Gregory
    Mar 30, 2015 at 17:55
  • My phone's standard browser is Safari which I don't like, so I'm using Grazing right now. Maybe that's nonstandard in your book. But I believe I have observed the same problem with desktop browsers, including Firefox, Chromium, and Safari. If it's a site I haven't logged in to for a while, I will need to authenticate.
    – tripleee
    Mar 30, 2015 at 18:18
  • Strange. When I go to a site I haven't logged into for a while, there's a pause, then I get a welcome back banner encouraging me to click it to refresh the site. I guess that's done with web sockets, so if you had scripting turned off or something maybe it wouldn't work.
    – Kate Gregory
    Mar 30, 2015 at 18:19
  • I got that just now in Grazing, too; but I think never when I click notifications in my supercollider inbox.
    – tripleee
    Mar 30, 2015 at 18:22

1 Answer 1

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This could be accomplished with an authentication token similar to how O-Auth works.

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