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Currently, almost every Stack Exchange site has its own login area, meaning the browsers login auto fill doesn't always work.

For example:

Stack Overflow login: stackoverflow.com/users/login Physics Stack Exchange login: physics.stackexchange.com/users/login

If I've saved my login credentials for Stack Overflow, they don't work for Physics Stack Exchange. I have to save them again, and vice-versa.

I propose a solution similar to that of Googles' is implemented,

accounts.stackexchange.com shared by all Stack Exchange sites.

EDIT

Someone has flagged this as a duplicate of this, but I assure you, it is not. That post is about how sites behave after logging into one of the sites, and this post is about unifying the login experience across all the Stack Exchange sites, so browser login auto-fill only needs to remember one set of credentials for one address: accounts.stackexchange.com

EDIT

Here's a screenshot of my browsers password manager, ridiculous!!

All the credentials are the same.

Chrome password manager

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  • 1
    I still don't understand how you end-up with credentials for all these sites. Did you also disable thirdparty-cookies or is there another reason universal login didn't work for you, leaving you no other option then to login on all those sites again?
    – rene Mod
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 10:17
  • 2
    @rene This is about browser-saved passwords. This isn't an issue once you're logged in, but when you're logged out your password is only saved on the specific sites you initially logged in to.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 10:27
  • I believe that you can login by using Stack Exchange, Google or Facebook; if you don't want to use Google or Facebook you can set up one account on Stack Exchange and use that to login to any of the sites. It would be helpful to include your browser version, OS and password manager. I join new sites regularly (using Google, and no password manager) and it's a few clicks to create a new account. If I'm logged into any one site I'm logged in everywhere that I already have an account (except SEDE).
    – Rob
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 10:36
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    @Rob Re: "if you don't want to use Google or Facebook you can set up one account on Stack Exchange and use that to log in to any of the sites". I have a Stack Exchange account and yet it doesn't show the user id and password I use to log in to Physics SE, when I try to log in to (say) Stack Overflow. Let me emphasize the OP's point: the issue is not about not getting logged in to Stack Overflow when I log in to Physics SE, but rather about the absence of auto-fill (with the Physics SE log in credentials) when I try to log in to Stack Overflow. This isn't a browser dependent issue.
    – user437611
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 10:43
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    @Blue is the real problem that the login form does't have the autocomplete attribute set on the input tags?
    – rene Mod
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 10:49
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    @rene Erm, I'm not quite sure what that means (don't really know much about web development). Anyway, I believe the problem is that we don't have a universal all-SE log in i.e. whether a person wishes to log in to Physics SE (https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/login) or they wish to log in to Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com/users/login), they should be redirected to log in through a unified page — something like https://stackexchange.com/users/login. That way we don't have to save our log in credentials for each SE site separately.
    – user437611
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 10:59
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    @Blue no, it is not enabled. I checked before I posted the comment.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 11:10
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    @Blue it would solve that you have to re-enter your credentials on each site. It won't solve that the passwordmanager still stores the credentials for each site. But again, with some self-discipline by always login in into stackexchange.com/users/login that would be solved.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 11:20
  • 5
    Maybe one day! There are a lot of technical hurdles to something like this in how we route things on the network that would at the moment add a lot of complication. However, on .NET Core we could for example handle the accounts domain routing in middleware and this is much more doable and comparatively way, way simpler. It's on my list as something we'd like to do for other reasons (e.g. de-duping login screen duplication). We plan to look at authentication after the .NET Core port this year, but have no concrete details past that, just lots of thoughts.
    – Nick Craver
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 13:16
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    @daka Nope :) Because the two aren't at all related. However, that's another project which is very much deep into design phase that will come here to meta as we actually have time to work on it after current items. I think you'll like the new approach - I've been pinged about the architecture to support it along the way and think it'll simplify tremendously for us on the backend and users on the frontend.
    – Nick Craver
    Commented Apr 20, 2019 at 13:27
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    @NickCraver should we tag this status-review, or is that intended only for shorter-term stuff?
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Apr 21, 2019 at 3:00
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    @MEE or in its actual name, status-graveyard. ;)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Apr 21, 2019 at 14:02
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    @daka It's not on the roadmap yet, but I hope to be in canary or wrapping up .NET Core this month. After that we'll be consolidating StackAuth and StackSnippets (on our end - users won't see a difference) as well as getting everything Linux-compatible. Those site consolidations will give us a lot of knowledge on what to expect and see what we can do for authentication. There's been a wrench here for everyone with the SameSite cookie shenanigans from Chrome as well - we had to delay anything until we saw how that plays out...since it had the potential to break current universal login.
    – Nick Craver
    Commented Feb 9, 2020 at 13:05
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    @daka That piece is the case already today for stackexchange.com, but keep in mind that cookie won't work on any sibling domain just due to how cookies work in general (they're never sent to another site). For example, do you login on stackoverflow.com? Or accounts.stackoverflow.com? Or accounts.stackexchange.com? (which would rely on third party cookies). We can't rely on third-party cookies, some people block them...those need to at least work on the current domain. There's also a user issue where we create on the current site...it's not a trivial move, but I am thinking on it!
    – Nick Craver
    Commented Feb 9, 2020 at 13:24
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    Guys, it'd really be appreciated if y'all did not have us keep typing our username and password to login to each and every StackExchange website when we've already logged into one. What exactly is the objective of forcing multiple logins?
    – Nav
    Commented Feb 13, 2023 at 5:06

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