[Yes, more from IJSM.org's WP Channel: All WordPress posts, all the time!]

While waiting with bated breath for WordPress MultiUser to come out at a 1.0 level, I have a conundrum: I can’t stay logged in to all of the RMFO-Blogs installations. I get the feeling that this is a cookie issue, but I’m not sure. Anyone who’s stared at the login code got any ideas? I’ve spent too much time fighting NASA property management regulations this week to stare at code.

Update: Insomnia at 0345 4 Mar 2005 led me to Google “maximum cookies per domain”; MSDN tells me that RFC 2109 tells user agents to keep at least 20 cookies per domain. The exact text from paragraph 6.3, emphasis mine:

6.3 Implementation Limits

Practical user agent implementations have limits on the number and size of cookies that they can store. In general, user agents’ cookie support should have no fixed limits. They should strive to store as many frequently-used cookies as possible. Furthermore, general-use user agents should provide each of the following minimum capabilities individually, although not necessarily simultaneously:

• at least 300 cookies
• at least 4096 bytes per cookie (as measured by the size of the characters that comprise the cookie non-terminal in the syntax description of the Set-Cookie header)
• at least 20 cookies per unique host or domain name

User agents created for specific purposes or for limited-capacity devices should provide at least 20 cookies of 4096 bytes, to ensure that the user can interact with a session-based origin server.

The information in a Set-Cookie response header must be retained in its entirety. If for some reason there is inadequate space to store the cookie, it must be discarded, not truncated.

Applications should use as few and as small cookies as possible, and they should cope gracefully with the loss of a cookie.

This goes back to the same kind of behavior seen with Mozilla foundation radically limiting the number of cookies you can set. When I’m not battling insomnia, I should so file a Bugzilla bug.