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It's no big secret that I'm not a fan of chat (anywhere, not just here). However, I find myself in the position of wanting to ask a question that is completely off topic for SF, so figured I'd try chat. When attempting to connect to the comms room, while logged in, I was presented with the following message:

Welcome to The Stack Exchange Network chat! You'll need 20 reputation to talk here. This site is moderated by the community, so please be respectful of your fellow The Stack Exchange Network users. And while you're at it, check out the FAQ!

I repeat, I was logged in already. Clearly something is wrong.

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Reset to default
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After posting this question I had another look and underneath the quoted message was, in quite a small text size, a login option. Whoever designed that needs a good kicking and should be looking for alternative employment. Then again, I have an extremely low tolerance of devs who don't understand UI design and don't test properly. The cookie issue both Chris S and vortaq7 discuss merely adds fuel to my outrage.

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    Telling the developers they need a good kicking is such a great way to get them to fix something.
    – Michael Hampton
    Commented Aug 31, 2012 at 4:22
  • @Michael, are you seriously suggesting that they would fix it if I kept my well formed views to myself? Have a look at all the things they haven't fixed. Why are devs so sacred? We say the same kind of thing to sysadmins, for the same kind of reasons.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Aug 31, 2012 at 6:27
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    Expressing an opinion on the quality of a work product is much different than expressing an opinion on the quality of the person who produced it.
    – Michael Hampton
    Commented Aug 31, 2012 at 6:44
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    For an apropriet ... Gratuity ... The devs could be kicked
    – Zypher Mod
    Commented Sep 2, 2012 at 5:42
  • Having had my rear end kicked on more than one occasion when I was an apprentice I can vouch for it's effectiveness in creating a better tradesman. It's a good learning tool that needs to be applied a lot more. As for the gratuity, all I can offer is my thanks.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Sep 3, 2012 at 7:15
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Chat occasionally "loses" login details (I've been in rooms talking and had it come back to me and say "You need to be logged in to talk in chat" and retrying the message makes the problem go away, or I've been on SF and tried to log in to chat and had the same experience you just described).

My usual solution is to go to http://chat.stackexchange.com/ -- If chat is truly confused you'll have a "Log In" link (and if you're already logged in to another SE site clicking the link will make chat happy). Otherwise visiting the chat site's homepage usually makes whatever login cookie the system expects to see show up.

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Try going to the Stack Exchange site, logoff, then login, then use the chat button directly from that site. If this doesn't work, you'll have to clear your cookies related to Stack Exchange. It's a known issue that chat is sensitive to cookie issues. I've run into it several times before, especially if the cookie expires.

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Chat is occationally buggy. In addition to what's been suggested, if none of that works try https://serverfault.com//users/chat-stackexchange-login - Its an old (and possibly unsupported ;p) shortcut to login which nearly always works for me.

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  • My issue wasn't with bugs in chat. My issue was that I couldn't even get into chat. Anyway, I did eventually get in.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Oct 8, 2012 at 6:26
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    Not being able to get into chat is a bug by any definition. The shortcut tends to log me in nearly all the time however. Hit the link, click on the button, and it usually just logs in perfectly fine.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Oct 8, 2012 at 7:55
  • Thanks for the shortcut but I dare say that by the time I want to get into chat again they will have changed the whole system.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Oct 8, 2012 at 9:26

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