How do all these web platforms achieve a long-time login session that does not require the user to login over and over again?

Question

I really don't get that: Some platforms have some kind of "persistent" login sessions. Like Stackoverflow and many other boards and platforms. I've logged in here a month ago. And even if I quit my browser totally and have another internet connection with different IP, I come back here with no login.

I can't belief that's just done with cookies, since cookies are not accepted in most modern browsers anymore (they would ask the user and the click instinctive "no").

I even encountered a platform that does persistent login regardless of the browser I use. I could use safari, or opera. No matter what. I was always logged in with my nick.

Since a few years have passed since that and I went totally off from web development, I wonder if technologies have changed? How is that done today?

Answer 1

I can't belief[sic] that's just done with cookies, since cookies are not accepted in most modern browsers anymore (they would ask the user and the click instinctive "no").

Just another example of the golden rule of rationality: Beliefs do not substitute facts.

Every major browser accepts cookies by default.

Answer 2

You can easily check that StackOverflow stores cookies in your browser.

Answer 3

Cookies make the world go round.

Answer 4

so... it seems you have your answer (or at least part of it), but I thought I'd add the detail (though I suspect you already know this), that you can set a cookie to expire at some point in the distant future, effectively making it permanent.

Answer 5

Cookies

Like Paul Dixon pointed out cookies are still accepted by the browser in some sort of fashion.

PHP Sessions and cookies.

In php this is most of the times done with sessions which default stores files on server to keep track of user and sents a cookie-header to store a cookie on the browser.

Read more about it from this zend tutorial

PHP Session-id prepended to url

It can also be done by appending session-id to url instead of using cookies.

ini_set('session.use_cookies', 0) // don't use cookies