Maybe you started at perlmonks.org but got transfered to to perlmonks.com? Perl Monks can be accessed through a number of domains, and logins are domain-specific. You can be logged in at one domain (say perlmonks.org), and not at another (say perlmonks.com). If you weren't logged in, you would appear to have no votes.

That's why links with absolute uris like
[http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=479]
are discouraged. One should use links such as
[id://479]
instead.

Ah that also answers why someday I suddenly saw the login box while I was logged in indeed. I didn't noticed the address bar. It was really suspicious to me thinking that something has forced me to logout so I changed password right away. But, why this double domain for exactly the same content and yet different treatment to users? While I haven't read all docs, but I think I have covered the most important ones. Did I miss something?

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Open source softwares? Share and enjoy. Make profit from them if you can. Yet, share and enjoy!

I'd recommend using one of the various PerlMonk CSS Themes to customise the appearance of PerlMonks (or even make your own). Then if you are ever not logged in, it will be immediately apparent.

Cheers,
Darren :)

The login or session info is kept in cookie. Cookie are domain specific (with some exceptions relating to subdomains). If you're visiting perlmonks.com, the server can't set a cookie for perlmonks.org. Your browser simply does not send PM your cookie if you're using the "wrong" domain, so PM has no idea who you are. Some sites "solve" this by redirecting all domains to the "canon" one, so no matter what domain is used to reach the site, all users end up using the same domain. PM lets you pick the domain you'd rather see in the address bar.

At 2007-04-14 02:50:46 EDT you upvoted all of the recent Obfuscated Code nodes, then you logged out. If you don't remember doing that, then the most likely explanation I'd guess at (besides you just forgetting) would be that you left a browser logged in and someone else used it (since you don't have some "upvote everything" javascript in your Free Nodelet Settings). I don't know how your university allocates IP addresses, but the votes were cast from the same IP that you posted the above node from (in case that helps you decide whether you should yell at your roommate, for example).

Update: Oh, and another likely explanation is that you didn't have any votes when you started but you had loaded a slightly stale page from your browser cache that was from when you had 10 votes left.

This may be too much personal information to give out.

I can understand that it might serve as an aid to doob to figure out what happened, but as one's votes are supposed to be anonymous (or at least as anonymous as one chooses to have them), it seems to me a bad precedent to make public how another's votes were cast.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Update:  I'm also a bit uncomfortable with personal information being made public on the basis of IP address lookup.  Such information is ordinarily not accessible to most readers at Perlmonks (nor should it be) and, IMO reduces the level of a user's anonymity, with no apparent benefit.

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s''(q.S:$/9=(T1';s;(..)(..);$..=substr+crypt($1,$2),2,3;eg;print$..$/

I leave it to doob to decide. I don't feel that a third party casting votes via doob's account has much right to privacy. This is, in fact, what I think happened, though I can't be certain. I have reasons for believing this, most of which I didn't and won't publish.

If those particular votes were actually cast by doob, I don't expect doob to mind anyway. Those particular votes were not cast for or against any particular monks, I didn't even expose any information about a particular voting pattern (this can't be a voting pattern unless doob only votes a few times each year as that is how infrequently he'd have a new page full of obfuscations that he could vote for). So I don't consider the particular voting instances of a sensitive nature for all of the above reasons. But I still wouldn't have published that except that doob asked, in public, for an explanation of where his votes went. I certainly expect that people doing that have some expectation that some public disclosure about where their votes went could be a result of such a request.

I do wish that I had come up with a more vague term than "university". Although you see "no apparent benefit", I did and do see a point in pointing out that there is an entity involved in allocating IP addresses and that this policy may be relevent here. Here, again, I have reasons for thinking that this may be relevent that I didn't and won't publish. Disclosing that doob has some association with some university is pretty slim information, but I wish I'd said "institution" or such instead.

- tye