I am fully aware this has been a long-standing issue here at TalkFreelance, but I fell victim to it again earlier and I thought I'd come and point out what to do to make it not an issue.

The issue is that you remain logged in at www.talkfreelance.com, but if you omit the www. then there is no session continuation. The problem is what you would call a tail mismatch. The cookies for TalkFreelance are set explicitly to .www.talkfreelance.com. When to work correctly across the www. and non-www. adaptations, you would need the tail to match URL's with and without www.. The solution thus being that the cookie domain should be set as .talkfreelance.com and not .www.talkfreelance.com.

It's not an urgent fix, but I at least hope we can have it fixed for the new design. Whoever added this little nifty feature into TalkFreelance was blissfully unaware about tail matching.

Further reading: Netscape's document on HTTP cookies.