The site knows whether you're "logged in" by setting a cookie, so first check that your browser is enabled for them. I think it must be, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to vote even once or twice.

Sometimes following a hyperlink that hasn't been set up right can make you appear to be "logged out". The reason is that both "perlmonks.org" and "perlmonks.com" lead here, but only one of the names is in the cookie that is set when you login. If people use the built-in syntax (i.e., the [square brackets]) to create links within the site that won't be a problem. However, sometimes people use a standard anchor tag (<a href="...">)or a square bracket that defeats the normal mechanisms (like [http://perlmonks.org/...]), and those can cause the problem. For example, if you normally use "perlmonks.org", this link will appear to log you out, and if you use "perlmonks.com", this one will do the same.

As for refreshing, it's better to use the talk button than hitting refresh in your browser. I'm not sure why you don't want to use it, though. Maybe if you describe why that's a problem, someone can point out an alternative.

Not very helpful to your problem, but I sometimes get disconnected by my ISP whilst reading some of the longer threads, but when I reconnect I can go ahead an vote without having to log back in or anything, so it would seem to me that the problem is with your browser/proxy/isp/set-up rather than with the PM site itself.

It might help if you identified which browser you are using along with any other salient relevant information that you have (EG. your connection is through a company firewall or your ISP uses a caching proxy, or you have Proxinomitron installed...etc).

That way, monks using a similar set-up may be able to say....do this or that or that they do not have the same problem... which may help to track down the cause of yours.

I am using Dillo It is a simple browser, and I have set it to receive cookies from PM. It is the latest version, but I don't know much about it, because of tiny documentation...

My connection is through firewall. There is some proxy between me and the net, but I don't think this is the reason.

There is also a strange thing - I am invisible on the list of users. Sometimes I appear, and sometimes I disappear (-:

Regards
pfm

pfm, I took a look at Dillo, and their bug tracking system has listed that the browser has some trouble with forms, queries and cookies, all of which are essential to working with Perl Monks.

I suspect that cookies are your problem. Cookies are not implemented the same way by all browsers, some of which will fail to return all of the cookies to the website when making a request.

I don't know what operating system you are on, but Opera works under Win9x/NT and Linux systems. I suggest giving that a shot (however, I've found that "tweaking" the cookie filter in Opera will sometimes render Perl Monks inoperable ).

Hope this helps and good luck!

Update: The other users nodelet takes a little bit to push you in there. It keeps you in there for three minutes, as well, so you could technically load a page from Perl Monks every 3 minutes and rand(59)+1 seconds and never see yourself in the list.

If a Monk falls in the Monastery... :)

John J Reiser
newrisedesigns.com

I don't have any specific suggestions to actualy fix this, I'm afraid. However, a couple of suggestions about debugging this might help. It looks like you possibly aren't staying logged in independent of voting or not. Try changing your theme under user settings, so it's visibly obvious if you're logged in or not. Also, Mozilla has a cookie viewer, so Dillo probably does to. You should have a cookie from perlmonks.org (or the domain you're using) named userpass with the content (username)%(long hex number)%(short hex number). (BTW, don't let that leak out to people you don't trust; the middle hex number is a reversable encoding of your password IIRC.)

update: not ie6 so ignore me...

rdfield