This has been reported quite a few times over the years, both with Chrome and Firefox (and maybe others, I did not read all the comments).
Since it is driving me crazy (but it's not like there is an alternative to Stack Overflow out there), I thought I would report it again.
What happens
I keep getting logged out of Stack Overflow, forcing me to log in almost every single time I come back to the tab (even if I did not close it). This also means that I get the damn GDPR popup every. single. time.
Right now, I am running on Firefox 111.0 (64-bit), but it started on an earlier version. The links above show that other people have experienced the same on Firefox and Chrome in the last decade.
Note that it has been working flawlessly for 10+ years on different browsers, and for 2+ years on this exact setup. The bug started appearing a couple months ago.
Moreover, it only happens for Stack Overflow. I am logged in tens of other websites, and they work flawlessly (suggesting that it's not just my browser losing all the cookies). Also it seems like I don't get logged out of other Stack Exchange websites.
My setup
It happens on Firefox 111 (but it was also happening with 110 and some other version), but I don't have issues with Brave (i.e. Brave stays logged in for weeks).
I am not using many extensions on Firefox:
What I tried to fix it
- Login with username/password
- Login with Google SSO
- Disable my ad blocker
- Remove cookies, cache, offline web data and site settings
- Contact SE support, which closed my ticket right away, saying something like: "it's probably your ad blocker, try another browser". Because it's closed, I can't answer, so the message I get is really "screw you, we could not care less".
- Create a new Firefox profile (and re-add my extensions and configs). It worked for a week, and now it's back to the original problem.
Question
Did it ever happen to you? Did it stop happening/did you find a fix?
Cookie “acct” has been rejected because it is already expired.
in the firefox browser console, possibly corresponding to the cookie disappearing from the stackoverflow.com cookie list. It seems to have happened when my RSS reader extension refreshed a question feed.