Troubleshooting users repeatedly being asked to sign in

If users come to you complaining that they keep having to sign in here’s what to check:

1. Does it happen on all browsers on all devices?

   1. If it’s only on one, then it’s probably them clearing or blocking the cookie than maintains the session.

   2. If it’s all the devices on your network, or the user’s device only when they’re on your wifi, then it’s something your IT team have done with the best of intentions - these pages should tell them what they need to know:

      1. Information for the IT team

      2. What are the hostnames I need to allow my users to connect to from within my network

      3. Privacy and cookies

   3. If it’s all browsers on all devices everywhere, then something has gone wrong at our end and we’re probably already working to fix it.

      1. Check the service status page: https://status.openathens.net/

2. Whose login page is it?

   1. If it’s your login page, then it’s going to be 1a or 1b above

   2. If the user has been directed to a different organisation's login page it might look similar to yours or could be very different. What it means is that they’ve followed a login path that identifies them as from that other organisation. This could be a wayfless or redirector link from somewhere else, or even just picking the wrong item in a list of organisations

      1. In most cases, users should be able to hit the back button and make a different choice

      2. Ask the user where the link was that they followed - whilst it’s probably one they got from a friend or another organisation’s pages, it might be a mistake on one of your own pages

         1. If you have teaching colleagues generating their own redirector links using the public facing redirector link generator, they may have set the wrong organisation

      3. If the user says that it used to work, they may be right. It shouldn’t have though, and we fixed it as part of supporting users with multiple affiliations.