The "Remember Me" Rant

Published 14 October 08 by Justin French

The “remember me” functionality, present in most web applications and web services is awesome. If you want to be remembered (and avoid logging in next time), check the box during the login process and it’s taken care of with a cookie. Next time you return, it’s like you never left. Awesome.

But what’s up with “remember me for 2 weeks”, as found in Delicious, for example. I don’t get it. It helps you out for two weeks like a champion, then just when things are going so well, it screws everything up by dropping the ball. Thanks for nothin’.

It’s broken because it feels less helpful than forcing me to login each visit — at least regular logins would help me commit the login details to memory.

If there’s a legit reason to expire the cookie after some period of time (I’m not convinced, but I’m keen to hear why), perhaps an improvement would be to continue remembering me for a period of 2 weeks, resetting the expiration date on the cookie each time I return to the site.

That feels like a pretty good experience to me.

Perhaps this is what the original “trail blazers” of this pattern had in mind, and somewhere along the way it got dumbed down and recycled into this awkward anti-pattern.

Optional listening material: It’s the innocent smiles you get at the start of a relationship before you fuck everything up by Aussie band Laura